HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY

(b. Ealing, Middlesex, England, 4 May 1825; d. Hodeslea, East-bourne, Sussex, England, 29 June 1895),

zoology, evolution, paleontology, ethnology, popularization, professionalization. For the original article on Huxley see DSB, vol. 6.

Huxley studies underwent a transformation in the later twentieth century. From his “science versus religion” metaphor to his Darwinian propaganda, from his cultural context to his biology training-programs, little remained untouched. The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley(1900), which informed much of the original DSB entry, was superseded by culturally embedded studies that show how Dissenting, industrializing, and scientific currents sustained Huxley and how he in turn reframed the great questions of duty, morality, and the value of science.

Medical Education . Huxley’s trajectory away from Anglicanism began in the 1835–1840 period in Coventry, where he mixed with Dissenting ribbon masters. In this industrial heartland, with its sectarian politics, he began questioning the duality of matter and soul and the legitimacy of the established church.

More has become known about Huxley’s education. His two medical brothers-in-law were John Charles Cooke, who apprenticed him in Coventry (1839), and John Godwin Salt—not “Scott” (an alias taken when he fled to the United States). In January 1841 Huxley’s apprenticeship continued under the reformer Thomas Chandler in East London, where Huxley experienced the privations of the poor, then later that year under Salt. In 1841–1842 he studied at Sydenham College, a cheap medical school where Cooke taught (and where Marshall Hall was developing his reflex arc). Huxley took the botany prize and was awarded a silver medal by the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries. On finishing at Charing Cross Hospital (1845), he passed part one of the London University Bachelor of Medicine exam, but his debts forced him to forego part two. He had no degree. Too young to obtain a Royal College of Surgeons’ license to practice, he joined the navy as assistant surgeon.

Rattlesnake Voyage and Oceanic Hydrozoa . A spate of studies on HMS Rattlesnake’s voyage to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, to coincide with Australia’s bicentenary celebrations. They exploited the numerous journals kept by the captain and crew and threw fresh light on Huxley’s circumnavigation.

Huxley specialized in the jellyfish and sea nettles (Siphonophora). He was deeply versed in European invertebrate anatomy, as was shown by his later London disagreements with Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg on the organelle content of protozoa, with Richard Owen on “Alternation of Generations,” and with the Schleiden-Schwann cell theory. Huxley dissected widely, especially ascidians (he discovered two new orders), but it was his studies on his forty new genera of jellyfish and siphonophores that made his name. Mary P. Winsor (1976) has elucidated Huxley’s work on the siphonophore archetype with its two “foundation membranes,” the basis of his new class, Nematophora (Heinrich Frey and Rudolf Leuckart preempted him with the term Coelenterata). Huxley’s views on jellyfish and ascidians as single organisms (rather than colonies) were also anticipated by Leuckart’s polymorphism theory. Huxley further fragmented Georges Cuvier’s embranchement, the Radiata, in 1851, when he unsuccessfully combined rotifers, flatworms, and starfish in a new group, the Annuloida.

The School of Mines and Fossil Work . In Sydney, Huxley became engaged to Henrietta Heathorn, a brewer’s daughter. Paul White has analyzed their touching correspondence to show how Huxley’s ideal of the selfless man of science emerged out his engagement with Henrietta’s domestic qualities of self-sacrifice and feminine virtue. They were married in London in 1855 and had eight children: Noel (1856–1860), Jessie Oriana (1858–1926), Marian (1859–1887), Leonard (1860–1933), Rachel (1862– 1934), Henrietta (1863–1940), Henry (1865–1946), and Ethel Gladys (1866–1941).

In London, Huxley penetrated the Westminster Review heart of literary radicalism. His column in the Review(1854–1857) bolstered what the English novelist George Eliot (pseudonym of Marian Evans) called his haughty scientific persona. But his predicament as a freelancer trapped in a commercial science nexus showed in his savagery toward Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The book was not denounced because of Huxley’s “critical skepticism of all theories,” as the original DSB article has it. With the antithetical categories of professional/amateur and elite/popular knowledge still forming, Huxley was using his scientific reportage to gain audience recognition of his expertise. He took shares in the Westminster, and in the Reader in 1864, and carried his goals through into Nature in 1869. Secular London science was seeking a distinct literary niche; and its birth pangs became evident when Huxley’s slashing “Science and ‘Church Policy’” editorial (1864) split the Reader consensus, alienating its Christian Socialist backers.

In 1854 he was appointed lecturer in natural history and paleontology at the Government School of Mines (a seeding institution training industrialists, surveyors, and teachers). Joining the Geological Survey, which, as James A. Secord (1986) shows, encouraged paleoecological research, Huxley was pushed increasingly into paleontology. He established that the coelacanths were relicts of Devonian Crossopterygian fish. And in proving that the Elgin sandstone reptiles were Triassic, not Devonian, he removed the last evidence for Charles Lyell’s nonprogressionist paleontology.

Huxley’s early paleontological views were idiosyncratic. Himself influenced by Lyell’s nonprogressionism, he harped on the unchanging nature of fossil lineages (his “Persistent Types”). In 1859 he believed that the major taxa had appeared before the Silurian period, after which they persisted little changed (so people might yet see Paleozoic pottery). This has been interpreted as a reaction to Owen’s archetypal progressionism in part. While Huxley’s Life and Letters castigated Owen as an aggressor, revisionists have investigated Owen’s and Huxley’s contrasting Oxford-Anglican and industrial-Dissenting patronage strings and their career rivalry in a confined field. Contemporaries called Huxley’s personality reactive. And Dov Ospovat illustrated the point: Where Owen’s archetype was made flesh through a specializing series of forms (illustrated by toe loss in fossil horses), Huxley—before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species(1859)—placed his abstract archetypes at the center of William Sharp MacLeay’s quinarian circles. The living types were situated equidistantly about the archetype, so there could be no specializing fossil series. Nor could humans result from a fossil ascent (Huxley, as an anonymous Westminster columnist, called humanity an “aberrant modification”).

Evolution . After visiting Darwin in 1856, Huxley found his secular needs better served by Darwinian naturalism and began his piecemeal reorientation. In January 1859 he declared that humans must have evolved from animals, pushing ahead of Darwin, who avoided humankind in the Origin of Species. Huxley’s campaign against the clergy was recast as a Manichean “Evolution versus Creation” dichotomy. In class he caricatured “Creation” as atoms flashing together into elephants, and Darwin ended the Origin with this straw-man alternative to evolution.

The original DSB article dwells on Owen’s antitransmutationist claim that humans alone possess a neuroanatomical ridge, the Hippocampus minor. Huxley’s rebuttal has generated a large literature. Christopher Cosans (1994) looks at Huxley’s Cartesianism and the Kantian Owen’s neuropsychological understanding; C. U. M. [Christopher Upham Murray] Smith (1997) too sees deeper contrasting philosophies but is more sympathetic to an accompanying social explanation; as is Charles G. Gross (1993), who has examined the neuroanatomy (and shown how Huxley detected new sulci during his dissections).

The DSB on the 1860 Huxley–Samuel Wilberforce repartee typifies an older warfare historiography (since deconstructed by James R. Moore, 1979). Subsequent revisionism includes Frank M. Turner’s 1993 territorial conflict thesis—which sees London’s men of science undercutting the spiritual sanction of a rival profession. This can itself be wrapped within Sheridan Gilley’s 1981 study of the contemporary splits within Anglicanism and a rising industrial Dissent, represented by the Puritan Huxley. (His zoological Calvinism, which emphasized stoicism in the face of hardship, could discipline a new industrial workforce, and his educational campaigns were backed by the manufacturers Joseph Whitworth and William Armstrong.) But note that Oxford’s liberal clergy, including the vice-chancellor Francis Jeune, were also sympathetic to Huxley’s rebuke of Wilberforce. This liberal Anglican alliance was reflected inside Huxley’s home, where Henrietta’s vicar, the Christian Socialist Llewelyn Davies, was welcomed.

Also problematic is the DSB’s summary of Huxley’s understanding of Darwinism. He was a morphologist where Darwin was a field naturalist, so Huxley was not particularly well acquainted with all of Darwin’s evidence. And it is untrue that “[f]or Huxley and others natural selection provided a method of organizing their own facts.” Both James G. Paradis (1978) and Turner foreground Huxley’s Carlylean Romanticism, which left him out of step with Darwin’s utilitarian approach. Huxley rarely mentioned natural selection: He does so only once in his Encyclopedia Britannica entry “Evolution” (1878), then negates with talk of the proclivity of organisms to vary.

Huxley also differed from Darwin on the completeness of the analogy between artificial and natural

selection, on saltationism, and on drowned continents. Evolutionary naturalism at times seemed their sole point of contact. For Huxley the Origin stretched “the domination of Science”: It authorized the man of science to talk on morality and origins. Indeed the book’s meritocratic Malthusianism made it a “Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism” (Huxley, 1860, p. 23).

Descriptive morphology remained Huxley’s forte, and only latterly did his monographs broach ancestry—of partridges (1868), crocodiles (1875), and crayfish (1880). While tentative family trees sometimes adorned his later notes, they were heuristic devices (illustrations are published in Desmond, 1997). His changing approach was stimulated by the concept of phylogeny in Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie (1866). Whereas in his 1863–1864 lectures Huxley had united reptiles and birds in the “Sauropsida,” only after reading Haeckel and finding the avianlike ilium of the dinosaur Euskelesaurus in Oxford University Museum in 1867 did he make dinosaurs actual bird ancestors.

Huxley was a persuasive publicist. As his audiences varied from jam factory workers to Eton toffs, so did his presentation. His provocative workingmen’s talks, such as those on human-ape relationships, secured this disenfranchised constituency by picturing evolution as a bottom-up system of self-betterment.

Education and Scientific Administration . Huxley held three chairs simultaneously in the 1860s: at the School of Mines, the College of Surgeons (1862–1869), and the Royal Institution (1866–1869). And, despite the Tory grandees trying to engineer one of their own as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1870, this too fell to Huxley: a sign of the nobility’s prestige in administrative affairs passing to the careerists. He was president of the Royal Society in 1883–1885. Of all his coteries, it was the informal “X Club” (formed in 1864), which met before Royal Society meetings, that has attracted most attention. X-Clubbers had been viewed as establishment outsiders on a professionalizing bent, but Ruth Barton (1981) shows this coalition of gentlemen and careerists to have been more concerned with employment, expertise, and recognition than professional accreditation.

Evelleen Richards (1989) has exposed Huxley’s attitudes toward women and race, particularly at the Ethnological Society. Here Huxley recast the human populations as persistent “stocks”—meeting the Anthropological Society ultraracists (who viewed the races as separate species) halfway before merging with them. Seeing a free society as the most efficient, he was against chattel and domestic slavery. As such he supported the North in the American Civil War (even though his brother-in-law Dr. “Scott” was a Confederate surgeon). He believed that women should not suffer educational discrimination, whatever their biological limitations. And Richards assesses how far Victorian women acquiesced in Huxley’s views of their limitations. Of course events overtook him: The only schoolmistress in his first South Kensington summer course in 1871 finished first in the class. Such successes eroded patrician prejudices, and Huxley had a woman demonstrator by 1874. In the 1880s women routinely attended his academic lectures.

Scholars now understand the context of Huxley’s biological Type-system. The 1870 Education Act led to the establishment of school boards. Huxley—a Chamberlainite interventionist—was elected for London’s Maryle-bone ward, and his education committee published a blueprint for London’s schooling. Huxley helped supply the necessary textbooks, with his Physiography(1877) and Introductory Science Primer(1880). New teacher-training techniques were also needed. The Science Schools at South Kensington (later the Royal College of Science) was established, and here Huxley devised a simplified school biology, whittled down to a few laboratory types. This became the standard school biology course for a century.

He helped to establish the vocational City and Guilds Institute in 1884. Although ironically, as Barton notes, by emphasizing the moral discipline of pure science (to make it rival the classics in forming the character, and to put his science teachers on a par with the dons), he increased the theoretical bent of technical education. His claim that science’s ethical obligations toward truth made it better than the classics for ushering in a moral reformation led to a dialogue with Matthew Arnold.

The exegesis of Huxley agnosticism has proceeded apace. Adrian Desmond (1994) documents Huxley’s early skepticism and the way he stretched the Dissenters’ “sin of conformity” into a “sin of faith.” The timing of Huxley’s neologism, appearing as the spiritualist Alfred Russel Wallace and the Catholic St. George Mivart fragmented the Darwinian coalition, is examined by Moore (1991). Huxley tied agnosticism to middle-class values, and Bernard Lightman (1989) recounts his faltering control as agnosticism was appropriated by radical groups.

Huxley’s agnostic ideological slate was never blank: His naturalism assumed axioms of the uniformity of nature and correlation of forces. He returned in the 1870s to the reflex arcs (pioneered in his student days) to discuss Cartesian brutes as self-adjusting machines and the mechanical equivalent of consciousness. His naturalism was polemically displayed in debates with William Ewart Gladstone on Genesis, the socialists on equality, and the bishops on their realist views of natural law.

His last major speech, “Evolution and Ethics,” at Oxford in 1893, has been reevaluated to show how he detached a brutal Malthusian nature from a pure human ethics after the death of his daughter Marian. Michael S. Helfand (1977) has him staking his Liberal political ethics midway between socialist demands for natural rights and Spencer’s laissez-faire alternative. The justice he had once seen in nature was gone: He now portrayed ethical man revolting against a morally indifferent cosmos.

Huxley and History . Huxley’s Collected Essays provide a propagandist insight into an emerging evolutionary worldview. He reinterpreted duty and morality for a secularizing, industrializing culture. His was a winner’s history, with its denigration of clergy and pre-Darwinian biology. In the later twentieth century this partisan image was transcended by historiographical approaches based on an understanding of the religious, industrial, and scientific currents that swept Huxley along, approaches that no less recognized his achievements in education, administration, and the assimilation of science. The centenary of his death was marked by new biographies, book-length studies, and a symposium at Imperial College, London, where the Huxley Archives are housed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY HUXLEY

On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences. London: Van Voorst, 1854.

The Oceanic Hydrozoa: A Description of the Calycophoridae and Psysophoridae Observed During the Voyage of H.M.S. “Rattlesnake,” in the Years 1846-1850. London: Printed for the Ray Society, 1859.

“On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 9 (1859): 381-487.

Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. London & Edinburgh: Williams & Norgate, 1863; New York: Appleton, 1863.

Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy. London: Churchill, 1864.

Lessons in Elementary Physiology. London: Macmillan, 1866; London & New York: Macmillan, 1871.

Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. London: Macmillan, 1870; New York: Appleton, 1870.

A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals. London: Churchill, 1871; New York: Appleton, 1872.

Critiques and Addresses. London: Macmillan, 1873; New York: Appleton, 1873.

A Course of Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology, by Huxley with the assistance of H. N. Martin. London: Macmillan, 1875.

The Evidence of the Miracle of Resurrection. London: Printed for the Metaphysical Society, 1876.

American Addresses, with a Lecture in the Study of Biology. London: Macmillan, 1877; New York: Appleton, 1877.

A Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals. London: Churchill, 1877; New York: Appleton, 1878.

Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature. London: Macmillan, 1877; New York: Appleton, 1882.

Hume. London: Macmillan, 1878.

Introductory [science primer] London: Macmillan, 1880; New York: Appleton, 1882.

Science and Culture, and Other Essays. London: Macmillan, 1881; New York: Appleton, 1882.

An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, Illustrated by the Crayfish. New York: Appleton, 1884.

The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century. New York: Appleton, 1887. “Autobiography,” in From Handel to Hallé: Biographical Sketches with Autobiographies of Professor Huxley and Professor Herkomer, edited by Louis Engel. London: Sonnenschein, 1890.

Social Diseases and Worse Remedies. London: Macmillan, 1891.

Essays on Some Controverted Questions. London & New York: Macmillan, 1892; New York: Appleton, 1892.

Evolution and Ethics. London & New York: Macmillan, 1893.

Collected Essays, 9 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1893-1894; New York: Appleton, 1894.

The Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley, 5 volumes, edited by Michael Foster, and E. Ray Lankester. London: Macmillan/New York: Appleton, 1898-1903.

T. H. Huxley’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, edited by Julian Huxley. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935; Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1936.

Thomas Henry Huxley: List of His Correspondence with Miss Henrietta Anne Heathorn, Later Mrs. Huxley, 1847-54, edited by Jeanne Pingree. London: Imperial College of Science and Technology, 1969.

OTHER SOURCES

Barr, Alan P., ed. Thomas Henry Huxley’s Place in Science and Letters: Centenary Essays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Bartholomew, Michael. “Huxley’s Defence of Darwin.” Annals of Science 32 (1975): 525–535.

Barton, Ruth. “Scientific Opposition to Technical Education.” In Scientific and Technical Education in Early Industrial Britain, edited by Michael D. Stephens and Gordon W. Roderick. Nottingham, U.K.: Department of Adult Education, University of Nottingham, 1981.

———. “‘Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others’: Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851–1864.” Isis 89 (1998): 410–444.

Collie, Michael. Huxley at Work: With the Scientific Correspondence of T. H. Huxley and the Rev. Dr. George Gordon of Birnie, Near Elgin. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1991.

Cosans, Christopher. “Anatomy, Metaphysics, and Values: The Ape Brain Debate Reconsidered.” Biology and Philosophy 9 (1994): 129–165.

Darwin, Angela, and Adrian Desmond, eds. The Thomas Henry Huxley Family Correspondence. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (Forthcoming).

Desmond, Adrian. Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875. London: Blond & Briggs, 1982.

———. Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.

———. Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest. London: Michael Joseph, 1997. These two volumes were combined as Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997; Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1998.

———. “Redefining the X Axis: ‘Professionals,’ ‘Amateurs,’ and the Making of Mid-Victorian Biology—A Progress Report.” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 3–50.

Di Gregorio, Mario A. T. H. Huxley’s Place in Natural Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

Forgan, Sophie, and Graeme Gooday. “Constructing South Kensington: The Buildings and Politics of T. H. Huxley’s Working Environment.” British Journal for the History of Science 29 (1996): 435–468.

Gilley, Sheridan. “The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration.” In Religion and Humanism: Papers Read at the Eighteenth Summer Meeting and the Nineteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, edited by Keith Robbins. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981.

Gilley, Sheridan, and Ann Loades. “Thomas Henry Huxley: The War between Science and Religion.” Journal of Religion 61 (1981): 285–308.

Gross, Charles G. “Hippocampus Minor and Man’s Place in Nature: A Case Study in the Social Construction of Neuroanatomy.” Hippocampus 3 (1993): 403–416.

Helfand, Michael S. “T. H. Huxley’s ‘Evolution and Ethics.’” Victorian Studies 20 (1977): 159–177.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. “The Origin of Species [1860]. In Darwiniana: Essays by Thomas H. Huxley. London: Macmillan, 1893.

Lightman, Bernard. “Ideology, Evolution, and Late-Victorian Agnostic Popularizers.” In History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, edited by James R. Moore. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

———. “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism: The Strange History of a Failed Rhetorical Strategy.” British Journal for the History of Science 35 (2002): 271–289.

Lyons, Sherrie L. Thomas Henry Huxley: The Evolution of a Scientist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1999.

MacLeod, Roy M. The “Creed of Science” in Victorian England. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate/Variorum, 2000.

Moore, James R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

———. “Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s.” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1991): 353–408.

Ospovat, Dov. “The Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryology, 1828–1859: A Reappraisal in Light of Richard Owen’s and William B. Carpenter’s ‘Palaeontological Application of “Von Baer’s Law.”’” Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1976): 1–28.

Paradis, James G. T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

———. “Evolution and Ethics in Its Victorian Context.” In Evolution and Ethics: T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics; With New Essays on its Victorian and Sociobiological Context, edited by James G. Paradis and George C. Williams. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Richards, Evelleen. “Huxley and Woman’s Place in Science: The ‘Woman Question’ and the Control of Victorian Anthropology.” In History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, edited by James R. Moore. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

———. “The ‘Moral Anatomy’ of Robert Knox: The Interplay between Biological and Social Thought in Victorian Scientific Naturalism.” Journal of the History of Biology 22 (1989): 373–436.

Richmond, Marsha L. “T. H. Huxley’s Criticism of German Cell Theory: An Epigenetic and Physiological Interpretation of Cell Structure.” Journal of the History of Biology 33 (2000): 247–289.

Roos, David A. “Neglected Bibliographical Aspects of the Works of Thomas Henry Huxley.” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 8 (1978): 401–420.

Secord, James A. “The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a Research School, 1839–1855.” History of Science 24 (1986): 223–275.

Smith, C. U. M. [Christopher Upham Murray]. “Worlds in Collision: Owen and Huxley on the Brain.” Science in Context 10 (1997): 343–365.

Smith, Roger. “The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy.” British Journal for the History of Science 6 (1973): 75–123.

Turner, Frank M. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

White, Paul. Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science.” Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Winsor, Mary P. Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life: Issues in Nineteenth-Century Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.

Adrian Desmond