Huxley (First Printing) From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest

A whopping life of Thomas Huxley (182595), who did much to bring Victorian-era science to a lay audience. History has tended to remember Huxley as a stalking horse for Charles Darwin, a man who popularized evolutionary theory but did not himself contribute much to it. Desmond (Darwin, 1992), a biologist and historian of science, does much to correct this view- -albeit somewhat breathlessly. It is true, he writes, that Huxley, a physician born into a family of decidedly modest means, spent much of his time speaking to workingmen's associations and other working-class groups about ape ancestors and cave men; it is also true that he popularized the word ``scientist'' and coined the term ``agnostic,'' and that he wrote the first article on evolution for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet Huxley made several important advances in the study of the polyp- and medusa-bearing animals, the Coelenterata. Like Darwin, he saw the wonders of the natural world at first hand, having sailed as ship's doctor and scientist on a Beagle-like voyage that introduced him to odd creatures and ecological mysteries; he was thus equipped to appreciate evolutionary arguments concerning the great variability of species over time and space. Huxley was in many ways Darwin's equal, Desmond suggests, but was marshaled as a lieutenant into the cause of natural selection after abandoning his anti-utilitarian view of nature, an abandonment that made him a follower, not a leader. Desmond is too fond of overwrought prose (he describes a dissecting-room cadaver as ``a cold body and a dead brain that had once glowed with hopes and desires''), but he makes a compelling case for our viewing Huxley as a crucial figure in the 19th-century social transformation toward the modern world. This is an unfailingly interesting contribution to the history of science. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

All of us know Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) as the earliest and most ardent advocate of the then heretical view Charles Darwin expounded in The Origin of Species. "My good & kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel," Darwin called him. In fact, it was Huxley, not Darwin, who enraptured and outraged audiences in the 1860s with talk of our ape ancestors and cavemen. But we know little else of this raven-haired figure with sunken, flashing black eyes and a lashing tongue, as handsome as an Apollo. Hence, my strong recommendation of this book by Adrian Desmond, who is a renowned historian not only of 19th-century British science but also of 19th-century Britain altogether. We learn about the social structure of England after the Napoleonic wars in vivid detail, and within this context we learn why T.H. Huxley came to endorse the Darwinian gospel with almost messianic zeal.

Because of his illustrious grandsons, Julian S. and Aldous L. Huxley, I was under the impression that the Huxleys must have been one of those long-established English upper-class families with an intellectual tradition. The original Huxley was certainly not one of them. Thomas Henry Huxley had no fortune to inherit, no family tradition to uphold. He was born above a butcher's shop in Ealing, a small village 12 miles west of London, and spent his early youth in the depressed silk-weaving city of Coventry. In London, he attended a cut-rate anatomy school, Sydenham College, which was behind University College Hospital, and then studied at Charing Cross Hospital, this time tuition-free. At the age of 21, he enlisted in the Royal Navy as an assistant surgeon and was assigned to H.M.S. Rattlesnake, an old "jackass" frigate of 28 guns nominally converted to a surveying ship that was presumably capable of accommodating a number of geologists, hydrographers, and naturalists. Under Captain Owen Stanley, she was to sail to the northern coast of Australia to survey northern Australia and New Guinea and many islands in between.

T.H. Huxley hoped that the biologic discoveries he made during this voyage would earn him a place among the naturalists. After four years of elation, hardship, and sorrow in strange seas, the Rattlesnake returned. Huxley immediately applied to the admiralty for a year's shore leave with half pay. The request was denied, although Sir Francis Beaufort hoped that Huxley would write a book "`creditable to himself, to his late captain... and to Her Majesty's service."' Earlier, Darwin, "the privately-financed companion to Captain FitzRoy, received (pound sterling) 1,000 after a nod to the Chancellor from his Cambridge tutor John Stevens Henslow," but Huxley was denied (pound sterling) 300.

Post-Napoleonic England was a nation of empire builders, and the Royal Navy ruled the waves. But side by side with the affluent beneficiaries of the victory over France and the subsequent Industrial Revolution (Darwin lived off his railway shares), many people worked long hours for wages that were barely enough to sustain them. It is no wonder that T.H. Huxley distrusted the Anglican teaching that espoused the status quo in the social order and sought an antidote to religion in science. This book shows that through their crusade to spread the gospel of Darwinism, Huxley and his cohorts initiated sweeping educational reforms, and these reforms modernized English social structure.

Desmond's book mentions a number of important discoveries made in 19th-century Europe before The Origin of Species that pointed to the notion of evolution. In his student days at Sydenham College, T.H. Huxley became aware of the cell theory of life that was maturing in Germany and that culminated in Rudolf Virchow's dictum: Omnis cellula a cellula. He was also aware that urea, present in the urine of all mammals, was synthesized by Friedrich Woehler in Germany in 1829. This achievement made a mockery of the long-held belief that only living creatures can synthesize organic chemicals.

At the jamboree of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Southampton in 1846, Richard Owen spoke of the vertebrate ground plan or "archetype," while Huxley spoke on homologies among the heads of crustaceans, insects, spiders, and millipedes. Clearly, the notion of a common ancestor of each group of animals was developing throughout Europe. From that idea to the theory of evolution was but one step. Indeed, Jean-Baptist Lamarck, professor of insects and worms at the Paris Museum of Natural History, had already ventured to propose the likelihood of a species in the past being transformed into another species today. One therefore wonders whether the Darwinian gospel would have found ready acceptance, at least by the scientific community, as a natural culmination of recently developed thoughts, had it not been for the militant endorsements of T.H. Huxley. In the history of ideas, however, ready acceptance is equated with rapid obscurity. By deliberately confronting the Anglican English public with the Devil's gospel, it was Thomas Henry Huxley of the lashing tongue who gave Charles Darwin immortality.

Reviewed by Susumu Ohno, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

In Victorian England, T.H. Huxley was more notorious than Darwin. He was a self-educated, pugnacious defender of the doctrine of evolution, preaching Darwin's findings to bishops and cloth-capped manual workers while winning converts of every class?loved and loathed by people he'd never met. He studied jellyfish, marine worms, primates, dinosaurs, and humans; coined the word "agnostic"; and was the first to be designated a "scientist." Desmond (Darwin, LJ 5/15/92), himself a scientist and writer on evolution, has produced an exhaustive biography, dense and detailed, with touches that bring Huxley alive. There are extensive quotes from Huxley's writings incorporated so seamlessly that it seems you are hearing Huxley speak. A definitive biography of an important figure, this book is highly recommended for academic libraries and any collection on the history of science, evolution, or the Victorian era.?Jean E.S. Storrs, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.