Huxley, Thomas Henry

(1825–95)

   Scientist and Educator.

   Huxley was born in Ealing, West London, and trained as a physician. As a naval doctor, he pursued his biological studies in the South Seas and, at the early age of twenty-six, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. A fervent disciple of Charles darwin, he was the author of Collected Essays, Zoological Evidences in Man’s Place in Nature and a study of David hume. He also delivered an important lecture in 1868 on ‘The physical basis of life’ in which he described himself by his own newly coined term as an ‘agnostic’. His final views were summarised in lectures on ‘Ethics and evolution’ delivered in 1893. Huxley was one of the most prominent English unbelievers of his day. A man of impeccable integrity, he worked tirelessly in several public offices and he did much to lay down the foundation for systematic scientific education in schools. In the history of the Church, however, he is mainly remembered as the man who was asked by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel wilberforce, at a meeting of the British Association in 1860, whether he traced his descent from an ape on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side.

   C. Bibby, Scientist Extraordinary: The Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley (1972);

   W. Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley and Evolution (1963), J.G. Paradis, T.H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (1978).