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Emphasizing the Later 19th Century

[Biography] [Portrait] [Quotes] [A Contemporary Biography (1888)] [Tribute to Huxley by H.L. Mencken] [Further Reading]
Thomas Henry Huxley

Biologist, Educator, and Defender
of Darwin's Theory of Evolution

"All of us owe a vast debt to Huxley, especially all of us of English speech, for it was he, more than any other man, who worked that great change in human thought which marked the Nineteenth Century." — H.L. Mencken

Thomas Henry Huxley (b. 4 May 1825; d. 29 June 1895) was a self-educated intellectual giant of the 19th century, a pioneering genius whose influence was felt throughout the science, education, and politics of Victorian England. His brilliant career ranged from surgeon's apprentice to England's Privy Council, service on 10 royal commissions, and president of the Royal Society from 1881 to 1885. His many awards included the Royal, Copley, and Darwin medals.

A man of astonishing energy and prodigious talent, Huxley had a sharp wit and a brilliant, questioning mind (traits no doubt passed on to his grandsons, including novelist Aldous Huxley [Brave New World, etc.]). He invented the term “agnostic” to describe his own religious view, and the term’s widespread, immediate acceptance freed intellectual discourse from the “belief”-versus-“disbelief” straightjacket, in and out of theistic contexts. And yet while he was never one to sacrifice principle for propriety, he vigorously defended his ideas but always treated his opponents with respect and sometimes-astonishing courtesy.

Always a popularizer of science, he at once subscribed to Charles Darwin’s theories and proved to be their most indefatigable advocate. The role earned him the title “Darwin's bulldog,” and he is best remembered today for his prominent role in defending evolution against attacks from scientists, theists, and philosophers — somewhat ironic, for Huxley's biological writings show less explicit support for natural selection than for evolution itself.

An Inauspicious Start

His professional career began with his voyage to Australia as ship's surgeon aboard H.M.S. Rattlesnake. Limited in resources and equipment, he devoted his studies on board to plankton and his work on classifying these minute organisms resulted in his election to the Royal Society in 1851.

Although Huxley was particularly expert in the study of marine invertebrates, naming the phylum Coelenterata, his work also included vertebrate biology, paleontology, ethnology, and the nature and reform of scientific education — the latter of which became a personal crusade for the rest of his life (see, especially, Science and Education, the third of nine volumes in his Collected Essays).

Huxley's writings span a remarkable range, reflecting his broad interests, intellectual passions, and social commitment. At age 20 he published his first paper, On a Hitherto Undescribed Structure in the Human Hair Sheathe, in the Medical Gazette. A list of his subsequent scientific writings spans nearly 10 pages, and although most of this work appeared between 1849 and 1879, he continued to publish in the scientific literature until the late 1880s.

His well-known and classic essay, On a Piece of Chalk, is a masterpiece of clarity and construction. Based on a public lecture to English workers, the essay reconstructs the geological history of Britain from a simple piece of chalk and demonstrates the methods of science as “organized common sense.” The essay, first published in Macmillan’s Magazine (London) in 1868, was handsomely republished in book form by Scribner’s in 1967. (The essay also appears in Huxley’s Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews [1870], which offers a good introduction to some of Huxley's social and political views.)

A Signal Role in Education

On a Piece of Chalk well represents Huxley's signal contribution to society outside the scientific arena: Through his writing he significantly influenced thinking about the form education should take; for instance:

Huxley advocated a program of broad primary school instruction that is essentially what we have today: reading, writing, arithmetic, art, science, and music. We take this for granted now, but it was an opportunity unobtainable in England during Huxley’s youth.

The basic form of nearly every American college curriculum is exactly what Huxley advocated more than 100 years ago: two years of more liberal basic studies followed by two years of what we now call upper-division work. This was a novelty in 19th century England, where Oxford and Cambridge focused on education in the classics.
Huxley greatly emphasized doing and observing in science classes, in primary school and certainly in college — we might call it "interactive learning" today. To Huxley, learning only from textbooks was a waste of time (a view reinforced by experience: Early in his career he overturned one textbook "fact" after another simply by conducting his own careful examination of "facts" everyone already thought they knew).

Among his most notable scientific and popular works:

Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), which went beyond Darwin’s Origin of Species by explicitly extending the idea of evolution to humans.
On Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature (1863).
On a Piece of Chalk (essay, 1868).
An Introduction to the Classification of Animals (1869).
A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals (1871).
A Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals (1877).
American Addresses (1877).
The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology (1879).
Essays on Some Controverted Questions (1892).
Collected Essays (various editions)
Used Textbooks For Sale

For anyone interested in scientific and intellectual history, Huxley is well worth reading.

Sources: DSB (VI: 589-597); CBD ([1984] 708); T.H. Huxley, Autobiography; Collected Essays.

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A Contemporary Biography — 1888

From T. Harrington, Prominent Men and Women of the Day, 1888

Professor Huxley has received nearly all the honors usually offered to learned men in his line of research. He has been president not only of the Royal Society, but of the Geological Society and of the British Association, and Lord Rector of the Aberdeen University. Breslau, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge have conferred on him their honorary doctorates.

Thomas Henry Huxley, F.R.S., LL.D., the naturalist, was born [1825] at Ealing, Middlesex, England, where his father was a master of a school. After receiving his preliminary education, he studied medicine, and in 1846, he took the diploma of M.R.C.S., in order to qualify himself for the medical service of the Royal Navy, which he entered as assistant surgeon. He was next appointed to a ship commissioned for the survey of the Australasian coast. His next appointment was as assistant surgeon to H.M.S. Rattlesnake, and he spent the greater part of his time from 1847-51 on the eastern and southern coasts of Australia. The results of his studies in natural history, for which the cruise afforded facilities, appeared in a work entitled Oceanic Hydrozoa.

Upon his return to England, in 1854, Professor Huxley found himself a man of some note in the scientific world. He now left the navy, and succeeded Edward Forbes in the natural history chair of the School of Mines, and from that day he continued to occupy a prominent place in the public life of the country.

Honor after honor has fallen to him, and had he cared for political distinction, it is certain that the popularity which secured his election to the first school board of London, would have carried him into parliament, and doubtless into the ministry.

In the next few years which followed, Mr. Huxley enriched zoology with numerous memoirs; and in 1857, the same year that he joined Dr. Tyndall [John Tyndall, Irish physicist and naturalist] in studying the nature of glaziers, he delivered his able lecture on The Theory of the Vertibrate Skull. In 1860, he delivered a series of lectures, which were published under the title of Lectures on our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature. Mr. Huxley also contributed largely to the English Cyclopedia; published his lectures on Comparative Anatomy in 1864; Lessons in Elementary Physiology in 1866; An Introduction to the Classification of Animals in 1869, and numerous other works.

When the Darwinian theory was first promulgated, Professor Huxley immediately ranged himself on its side. It may indeed, be doubted whether without his powerful support the doctrines of the great English naturalist would have found so ready an acceptance in the highest scientific circles.

No one has ever excelled Mr. Huxley in expressing in a clear, masculine language the facts which he desired to enforce. Hence, not only his Hume in the English Men of Letters series, but his Lay Sermons, Addresses, [and] Reviews, etc., may be taken as models for the imitation of every one desirous of acquiring a correct English style.

He has been made a member of scientific societies in all parts of the world, and is the author of many popular scientific works.

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Quotable Huxley ...

"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the
man who has so much as to be out of danger?"
* * *
“The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.”
* * *
“What sculpture is to a block of marble,
education is to the soul.”
* * *
“If you go buzzing about between right
and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you
come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely
and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you
must, some of these days, have the
extreme good fortune of knocking your
head against a fact, and that sets
you all straight again.”
* * *

Undated photo of young Huxley. Radio Times Hulton Picture Library

"History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to
begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand,
it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new
generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in
danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as
little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many
of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them."
— From The Coming of Age of "The Origin of Species,"
in Collected Essays, vol. II: Darwiniana

What Huxley fought for was ... the right of civilized men to think freely and speak freely, without asking leave of authority.... [His contribution] constitutes one of the glories of the Nineteenth Century. Far more than forty wars, far more than all the politicians of the century, far more even than the work of Darwin, it liberated the mind of modern man.

— H.L. Mencken, from the 1925 essay below

A Tribute by H.L. Mencken
May 4, 1925

I
On May 4, 1825, at Ealing, a third-rate London suburb, there was born Thomas Henry Huxley, the son of a schoolmaster. I mention Huxley pere in sheer humane politeness; having discharged his august biological function, he passed into the obscurity whence he had come. Young Thomas Henry, it appears, was almost wholly the son of his mother. He had her piercing eyes, he had her dark comeliness, and he had, above all, her sharp wits. "Her most distinguishing characteristic ... was rapidity of thought." What her lineage was I don't know, but you may be sure there was good blood in it.

Huxley was educated in third-rate schools [see note below] and studied what was then regarded as medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. In 1846, having no taste for medical practice, he joined the British Navy as an assistant surgeon, and was presently assigned to the Rattlesnake for a cruise in the South Seas. He was gone for four years. He came back laden with scientific material of the first importance, but the Admiralty refused to publish it, and in 1854 he resigned from the navy and took a professorship in the Royal School of Mines.
Thereafter, for forty years, he was incessantly active as teacher, as writer and as lecturer. No single outstanding contribution to human knowledge is credited to him. He was not so much a discoverer as an organizer. He found science a pretty intellectual plaything, with overtones of the scandalous; he left it the chief serious concern of civilized man. The change aroused opposition, some of it immensely formidable. Huxley met that opposition by charging it, breaking it up and routing it. He was one of the most pertinacious fighters ever heard in this world, and one of the bravest. He attacked and defeated the natural imbecility of the human race. In his old age, the English, having long sneered at him, decided to honor him. They made him a privy councillor, and gave him the right to put "The Right Hon." in front of his name and "P.C." after it. The same distinction was given at the same time to various shyster lawyers, wealthy soap manufacturers and worn-out politicians.
II
Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century — perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks of him inevitable in terms of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man. A touch of the poet was in him, and another of the romantic, gallant knight. He was, in almost every way, the perfected flower of Homo sapiens, the superlatively admirable all-'round man.
Only too often on meeting scientific men, even those of genuine distinction, one finds that they are dull fellows and very stupid. They know one thing to excess; they know nothing else. Pursuing facts to doggedly and unimaginatively, they miss all the charming things that are not facts. Such scientists are responsible for the poor name which science so frequently carries among plain men. They radiate the impression that its service is dehumanizing — that too much learning, like too little learning, is an unpleasant and dangerous thing.
Huxley was a sort of standing answer to that notion. His actual knowledge was probably wider than any other man of his time. By profession a biologist, he covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything. But he was by no means merely learned; he was also immensely shrewd. I thumb his essays at random. Here is one on the Salvation Army — the most realistic and devastating treatise upon that maudlin imposture ever penned. Here is one on capital and labor — a complete reduction ad absurdum of the

Huxley, ca. 1890.
Marxian balderdash in 3,000 words. And here is one on Berkeley's metaphysics — a perfect model of lucid exposition.

III All of us owe a vast debt to Huxley, especially all of us of English speech, for it was he, more than any other man, who worked that great change in human thought which marked the Nineteenth Century. All his life long he flung himself upon authority — when it was stupid, ignorant and tyrannical. He attacked it with every weapon in his rich arsenal — wit, scorn, and above all, superior knowledge. To it he opposed a single thing: the truth as it could be discovered and established — the plain truth that sets men free.
It seems simple enough today, but it was not so simple when Huxley began. For years he was the target of assaults of almost unbelievable ferocity and malignancy. Every ecclesiastic in Christendom took a hack at him; he was denounced as the common enemy of God and man. Darwin, a mild fellow, threw The Origin of Species into the ring and then retired from the scene. It was Huxley who bore the brunt of the ensuing theological assault, and it was Huxley who finally beat it down, and forced the holy clerks to turn tail. It always amuses me today to read of intellectual clergymen championing what they call Modernism. Their predecessors of but two generations ago were unanimously engaged in trying to damn the first Modernist to hell. The row was over Darwinism, but before it ended Darwinism was almost forgotten.
What Huxley fought for was something far greater: the right of civilized men to think freely and speak freely, without asking leave of authority, clerical or lay. How new that right is! And yet how firmly held! Today it would be hard to imagine living without it. No man of self-respect, when he has a thought to utter, pauses to wonder what the bishops will have to say about it. The views of bishops are simply ignored. Yet only sixty years ago they were still so powerful that they gave Huxley the battle of his life.
IV He beat them — beat them badly, and all their champions with them. His debate with Gladstone remains the greatest intellectual combat of modern times. Gladstone had at him with all the arts of the mob orator — and to them was added the passionate sincerity of a genuinely religious man. Huxley won hands down. Defeat became a rout.Gladstone retired from the field completely undone, with his cause ruined forever. You will find the debate, in full, in the two volumes, Science and Hebrew Tradition and Science and Christian Tradition. Huxley's contribution to it constitutes one of the glories of the Nineteenth Century. Far more than forty wars, far more than all the politicians of the century, far more even than the work of Darwin, it liberated the mind of modern man. For Huxley was not only an intellectual colossus; he was also a great artist; he knew how to be charming. No man has ever written more nearly perfect English prose. There is a magnificent clarity in it; its meaning is never obscure for an instant. And it is adorned with a various and never-failing grace. It never struts like the prose of Macaulay; it never simper's like Pater's. It is simple, precise, unpretentious — and yet there is fine music in every line of it. The effects it achieves are truly overwhelming. One cannot read it without succumbing to it. Again I point to the two volumes of the debate with Gladstone. If they don't thrill you, then go back to the sporting page. [Return to Top]

Note: Mencken errs here by suggesting there was more than one school, and that they were as good as third rate. Huxley attended only one school as a youth — and then only for two years — and by his own account it was little more than a holding pen. But Huxley was a voracious reader, and he educated himself in history, sciences, literature and the arts, and languages — Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian. [Click HERE to return to the biography]