Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple To Evolution’s High Priest (Helix Books) by Adrian Desmond (PDF)

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T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) was Darwin’s bloody-fanged bulldog. His giant scything intellect shook a prim Victorian society; his “Devil’s gospel” of evolution outraged. He put “agnostic” into the vocabulary and cave men into the public consciousness. Adrian Desmond’s fiery biography with its panoramic view of Dickensian life explains how this agent provocateur rose to become the century’s greatest prophet.Synoptic in its sweep and evocative in its details, Desmond’s biography reveals the poverty and opium-hazed tragedies of young Tom Huxley’s life as well as the accolades and triumphs of his later years. The drug-grinder’s apprentice knew sots and scandals and breakdowns that signaled a genius close to madness. As surgeon’s mate on the cockroach-infested frigate Rattlesnake, he descended into hell on the Barrier Reef, but was saved by a golden-haired girl in the penal colony.Huxley pulled himself up to fight Darwin’s battles in the 1860s, but left Darwin behind on the most inflammatory issues. He devasted angst-ridden Victorian society with his talk of ape ancestors, and tantalized and tormented thousands-from laborers to ladies of society, cardinals to Karl Marx—with his scintillating lectures. Out of his provocations came our image of science warring with theology. And out of them, too, came the West’s new faith-agnosticism (he coined the new word).Champion of modern education, creator of an intellectually dominant profession, and president of the Royal Society, in Desmond’s hands Huxley epitomizes the rise of the middle classes as the clawed power from the Anglican elite. His modern godless universe, intriguing and terrifying, millions of years in the making, was explored in his laboratory at South Kensington; his last pupil, H. G. Wells, made it the foundation of twentieth-century science fiction.Touching the crowning achievements and the crushing depths of both the man and his times, this is the epic story of a courageous genius whose life summed up the social changes from the Victorian to the modern age. Written with enormous zest and passion, Huxley is about the making of our modern Darwinian world.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Library Journal 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., BaltimoreCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From The New England Journal of Medicine 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. From Kirkus Reviews 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. Review America at the end of this century awaits its own Huxley. When he does come along, Adrian Desmond’s splendid biography will provide a blueprint for how to wage a successful campaign on behalf of science and its grand ideals. — The Wall Street Journal, Frank M. Turner It is hard to find a lot to complain about, much less to ridicule, in this biography. Dull review, I know. One thing will probably strike American readers, even in the midst of their delight: Desmond will seem vastly to overstate the fullness of Huxley’s victory, the triumph of secular agnosticism and scientific rationalism. Is our modern world Huxley’s? I don’t know how it is in Desmond’s England, but the contemporary United States seems to me about as skeptical, scientific and agnostic as a 10th-century tribe of frog-worshipers. — The New York Times Book Review, James R. Kincaid Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐While this is an extremely thorough and complete review of Huxley’s life and work, I found several problems with the book. In brief, these include: A Hemingwayesque type of writing (short declaratory sentences) without H’s style to pull it off. An overuse of adjectives by about a factor of three. Many sentences that, in spite of being short, were hard to disentangle grammatically. My most serious criticism of the content, though, is that the author stuck much too closely to a time-line rather than an idea or subject line. For example, he makes the statement, in several places, that finally Huxley saw the light and fully bought into evolution and natural selection as presented by Darwin. But he never seems to explain this: why the hesitancy and why the “sudden” conversion. There is too much mixing up of private life with scientific ideas. And no real counter is given to Huxley’s antipathy to Owen whose work seems to be at least as long-lived as Huxley’s (dinosaurs?). For my taste, a much more satisfying way of writing scientific biography can be found by reading Janet Browne’s first vol. of a bio. of Darwin (“Coasting”).

⭐Considering that this book is unavailable as a Kindle book which I would have preferred and considering that the author is Adrian Desmond who co-authored the authoritative biography of C. Darwin I think finding this used book a real bargain. I have read Desmond and Moore’s biography of Darwin and was very impressed with the level of scholarship and so far what I have read of the TH Huxley biography I can see the same level of in depth research.

⭐This very thorough biography not only describes the often astonishing twists and turns to our developing understandings of evolution in the years after the publication of Origin of Species (even Huxley, an ingenius and dogged scientist himself–and “Darwin’s bulldog”– didn’t seem to really quite “get” some fundamental implications of natural selection. Also fascinating is the history this book gives us of the invention of “scientist” as an honorable paid profession in Britain in the late 19th century. According to the book, Thomas Huxley stood at the center of that crusade (so to speak) to make science an essential part of education and our working lives. Even after reading numerous books about Darwin and related folk, I come away from this biography with a much, much deeper sense of the complexity and slow and often quirky progress with which science has advanced.

⭐Desmond’s biography of Thomas Huxley is thorough – over 600 pages of detailed text. The book is a treasure house for information relating to Huxley and the state of 19th century “natural science” in England. I read the book after reading Janet Browne’s two volume biography of Darwin which outdoes Desmond in detail with both volumes combined being over 1000 pages. But there is a huge difference in writing styles. Browne is straightforward without ever being dull. She works hard at getting her own authorship out of the way and succeeds admirably in getting the reader inside the mind of Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, Desmond is less successful at doing that. The details are there and parts of the book are fascinating. But the drama that comes through in certain sections is in spite of the writing style, not because of it. Desmond’s writing style draws much more attention to the author. As other reviewers have noted, he uses allusions and literary devices constantly. Almost every paragraph has at least one, some are filled with them. Many of the allusions are comparisons to cultural or historical events. For example, Desmond refers to Huxley many times as “Schamyl,” an Islamic leader in the Caucasian War. Huxley had done research on him for the government and identified with his cause against the repressive tyranny of Russia. Desmond sees a similarity of goals in that Huxley thought of himself as fighting the tyranny of an encrusted and repressive Christianity and bringing intellectual freedom to the people – thus the allusion. Understandable, but Desmond uses this analogy and others far too much and many of the meanings are not transparent to contemporary readers. A very common device Desmond uses is a one or two word metaphor to describe a person or event and the reader is expected to fill in the rest. Huxley’s friends are the “cloth caps;” Huxley is both Darwin’s “bulldog pup” and “tearaway” because of his differences from Darwin. Typical sentences, the first concerning one of Huxley’s depressive moods and the second his early relationship to Darwin: “His nerves created waves in the nihilistic void and the lecture somehow shook itself together” and “It was time to invite the tearaway to Downe for a ‘pumping’ session.” One reason Desmond uses these techniques is because Huxley himself frequently used them in his own writings and speeches. Some readers may enjoy this style for over 600 pages. But, in the context of a biography, I found the constant use of these literary techniques drew too much attention to the language and the author and made understanding the subject more difficult rather than enlightening.I mention the problem with language the book has but I also want to mention one of its most positive points. In the Introduction Desmond says that he will be approaching Huxley in context, i.e., portraying him in the social context which formed him as a person and which permeated much of his scientific life. The book is an excellent example of a scientist working in his cultural milieu, in this case the stratified society of Victorian England. If the reader can work through the language, he or she will find this point very well done. Huxley’s working class upbringing, including his many extremely successful talks to everyday workers, and his gradual emergence into the upper regions of British science is well-documented and helps a great deal in understanding the man. The book’s details and its ability to put the man in context are true strengths. But the reader frequently has to work through difficult verbiage to get there. Desmond’s book is the best on the market about this brilliant, incisive, and fascinating man who made the understanding of science, and specifically of evolution, his life goal. Despite the writing style I recommend the book.

⭐Thomas Henry Huxley incarne un moment particulièrement important de l’histoire de la biologie et de l’histoire des sciences. Il participe aux débats sur l’évolution en devenant le plus acerbe des défenseurs de Darwin et il s’affirme comme le promoteur acharné de l’enseignement moderne et professionnel de la science. A ces combats, que Desmond analyse avec rigueur, s’ajoute la personnalité attachante d’un bourreau de travail, d’un intellectuel à l’ironie mordante. Les sources et le contexte scientifiques sont utilisés avec une grande rigueur. Mais ce livre a (pour moi) un grave défaut : le style ampoulé (ou flamboyant selon les goûts) de l’auteur. IL a fini par gâcher la lecture d’une biographie sinon très attachante.

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