Thomas Henry Huxley

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class — "Thomas Henry Huxley"

Podcast: Stuff You Missed in History Class (iHeartPodcasts)
Hosts: Holly Frey & Tracy V. Wilson
Date: July 29, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Holly and Tracy explore the life and legacy of Thomas Henry Huxley—best known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his passionate defense of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also notable for his contributions to science education, scientific debate, and a famously gracious admission of error in marine biology. The hosts delve into Huxley’s upbringing, major scientific work, the infamous “Great Debate” at Oxford, his advocacy for accessible education, and his complicated relationship with religion and ethics.

The episode balances scientific context with personal anecdotes, highlighting Huxley’s humor, humility, and his profound influence on science and society.

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Early Life and Education

Key Points:

• Birth and Childhood:

  • Born May 4, 1825, in Ealing, England (then a village outside London)
    [05:18]
  • Youngest of seven children (six survived infancy); family lived above a butcher shop.
  • Self-deprecating recollection: Huxley joked that if a swarm of bees had been allowed to settle on his lips, he might have gained “mellifluous eloquence.”
    • Quote (Read by Tracy):

      “If that well meaning woman had only abstained from her ill timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which in this country leads far more surely than worth, capacity or honest work to the highest places in church and state.... I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean by in the plainest of plain language...” [06:18]

• Education:

  • Only received two years of formal schooling before his father's school closed.
  • Self-educated from age 10 using his father's library, taught himself French and German to read Descartes and Goethe. [07:42]

• Mother's Influence:

  • Credited much of his intellect to his mother Rachel’s “rapidity of thought."
    • Quote:

      “If my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit.” [08:41]

• Religious Doubt:

  • Though raised Anglican, he grew increasingly skeptical of religion as a teenager, distancing himself over time. [09:32]

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Medical Training and Early Scientific Career

Key Points:

• Medical Apprenticeships:

  • Apprenticed to his brother-in-law, a doctor, then to a London physician serving the poor.
  • Saw harsh poverty, which affected his lifelong views on education and social responsibility.
    [10:49] Holly: “That part of his apprenticeship really impacted the way he thought about education for the rest of his life and what he could do to help people.”

• Personal Health Struggles:

  • Frequently ill after an early exposure to dissection; humorously called his “constant friend hypochondriacal dyspepsia.” [11:56]

• Academic Recognition:

  • Scholarship to Charing Cross Hospital (London University), won gold medal in anatomy and physiology.
  • Identified a layer in hair, now known as “Huxley’s layer.” [11:56]

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Naval Service and Scientific Breakthroughs

Key Points:

• Royal Navy and the HMS Rattlesnake:

  • Joined Royal Navy as ship’s assistant surgeon, participating in a multi-year voyage in the South Pacific aboard HMS Rattlesnake. [16:54]
  • On this mission, studied sea anemones and jellyfish, leading to a well-received paper published by the Royal Society.
    • Huxley’s reflection:

      “It was good for me to live under sharp discipline... to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank... and more especially to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it.” [17:28]

• Connection to Henrietta Ann Heathorn:

  • Met and became engaged to Henrietta in Sydney, Australia; married after returning to London. [18:24, 20:59]

• Career Shift:

  • Transitioned from military to academic/research roles (curator at the Museum of Practical Geography and professor at the Royal School of Mines), despite initial reluctance toward paleontology.
    • Quote:

      “I did not care for fossils and that I should give up natural history as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for 31 years...” [20:59]

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Huxley’s Place in Evolutionary Theory

Pre-Darwinian Context:

• Critiquing Predecessors:

  • Skeptical of Lamarck’s theory (inheritance of acquired traits):

    • Quote:

      “Lamarck, sagacious as many of his views were, mingled them with so much that was crude and even absurd as to neutralize the benefit which his originality might have affected had he been a more sober and cautious thinker.” [23:52]

  • Mocked the anonymously published “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” as unvetted and scientifically erroneous.

    • Quote:

      “We grudge no man either the glory or the profit to be obtained from charlatanry... But a book may, like a weed, acquire an importance by neglect which it could have attained in no other mode...” [25:27]

Support for Darwin:

• Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" (1859):
  • Huxley was an early, strong supporter—reviewed Darwin’s manuscript before publication.
    [26:28]
  • Gained the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his public, combative defense of natural selection. [27:16]
    Holly: “Darwin was like, I don't want to fight about this. And Huxley was like, oh I will, bring it on!”

---

The Great Debate at Oxford (June 30, 1860)

Key Points:

• Setting:

  • Oxford University, formal debate with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce during the museum’s opening.
    [31:35]

• The Famous Exchange:

  • Wilberforce mocked Huxley for “descending from an ape”; Huxley’s famed retort:

    “If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed... and yet employs these faculties... for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion. I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” [32:27]

• Aftermath:

  • The room, now called the Huxley Room, honors his rhetorical victory and the moment’s significance for science.

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Clarifying Darwin vs. Huxley on Human Evolution

• Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" implied a connection between humans and apes but did not explicitly state it.
  [33:39]

  • Darwin quote:

    “In the distant future, I see open fields for far more important researches... Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” [34:07]

• Huxley was the one to more forcefully argue for humans’ evolutionary connection to apes in his 1863 book, "Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature."

  • Quote (paraphrased):

    “Let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians... Placing [a human] among the mammalian vertebrates... is obvious.” [34:52]

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The Bathybius Blunder: A Famous Scientific Mistake

Key Points:

• Huxley thought he’d discovered a “living” protoplasmic organism (Bathybius Haeckelii) in Atlantic seabed mud.

  • Later proven to be a chemical artifact (gypsum + alcohol), not living matter. [39:21]

• When corrected, Huxley publicly and humorously admitted his error:

  • Quote:

    “If you have read your Shakespeare, you would know what it is to mean by eating a leek. Well, every honest man has to do that now and then... The devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood...” [40:19]

  • He pledged to set the record straight wherever possible and did not let critics use the episode to attack science as a whole.

  • Quote:

    “The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.” [41:14]

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Advocacy for Science Education and Access

Key Points:

• Deeply believed in education for all, regardless of background or formal schooling. [41:47]
• Created the “Working Man Lectures” to demystify science for people lacking formal education.
• Advocated for women in science: co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women alongside Sophia Jex Blake and Elizabeth Blackwell in 1874. [42:43]
• Helped design science curricula for teachers in rural areas.

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Later Life: Ethics, Agnosticism, and Family

Key Points:

• In "Evolution and Ethics" (1893), Huxley argued morality need not be rooted in religion, but could be grounded in science for humanity’s benefit. [43:22]

• Popularized the term “agnostic”; emphasized judging questions (including the existence of a deity) by evidence.

  • Quote (from “Agnosticism in Christianity”, 1889):

    “The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems, the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic... I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable...” [44:13]

• Personal hardships in his last years:

  • Daughter Marion’s mental health crisis deeply affected him; he resigned as President of the Royal Society and retired by the late 1880s. [45:44]
  • Died June 29, 1895, in Sussex, England. [46:12]

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Legacy

Notable Family Connections:

• Grandson Aldous Huxley (author of "Brave New World")
• Grandson Andrew Fielding Huxley (Nobel Laureate, Medicine, 1963)
• Grandson Julian Sorrell Huxley (UNESCO’s 1st director, WWF co-founder)
  [48:19]

Posthumous Tribute:

• Widow Henrietta published “Aphorisms and Reflections” in 1907 to show Huxley’s multifaceted contributions beyond his scientific debates.
  • Quote (Henrietta Huxley):

    “I have gathered together passages on widely differing themes... for their pure beauty of lucid English writing. I hope that these selections may attract the attention of the working man whose cause my husband so ardently espoused and to whom he was the first to reveal... the many rainbow colored rays of science...” [46:31]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On mistakes:

  “The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.” — Huxley [41:14]

• On ethics:

  “If everyone is treated ethically, both the individual and the larger group are going to benefit and have a better outcome.” — Paraphrased summary by hosts [43:22]

• On his writing style:

  “He’s a little self deprecating all the time, but he’s also able to kind of stick a little jab in at the pompous nature of a lot of the institutions of English society.” — Holly [07:13]

• On being “Darwin’s Bulldog”:

  “Darwin was like, I don’t want to fight about this. And Huxley was like, oh I will, bring it on.” — Holly [27:16]

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Suggested Further Reading

• For writings by and about Huxley, including his essays and correspondence, see the episode’s show notes at missedinhistory.com.

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Engaging Listener Mail (Bonus)

• Listener Melanie shared creating family holiday cards in historical costumes, inspired by History Class episodes. Tracy and Holly delight over her 1950s Disneyland-themed photo and the family frog named Moss. [49:12-51:14]

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This episode presents Huxley not only as a scientific advocate and fierce debater, but as someone who championed educational access, modeled humility in error, and left a family legacy of science, literature, and public service.

Transcript

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[Holly Frey]

Peace of mind welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Frey]

This is an episode that we are recording while we are on a visit to the Bahamas. We are in the studio at Baja Martin. So I wanted to do something that related to marine biology. It is a little related to marine biology. There is a lot more to the story of Thomas Henry Huxley than the embarrassing scientific blunder in marine biology that he made, although that is one of the most famous events of his life. And he actually, in my opinion, offers up a pretty good example of having a good attitude about learning in public, about making a gaffe and then acknowledging errors and learning from them. He also is sort of famously known by his nickname, Darwin's Bulldog, for his very vocal support of Darwin's work. And he also just generally wanted to promote science and education, particularly people that normally did not have access to those things. He wrote late in his life. Quote, it is with this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable or unreasonable ambition for scientific fame which I may have permitted myself to entertain to other ends, to the popularization of science, to the development and organization of scientific education, to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolution, and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science. So he's pretty interesting. Heads up. There is so much documentation written about and by Thomas Huxley that there's no way to cover it all. So if you are a Thomas Huxley scholar, you may be like you're leaving some stuff out. There's no way not to just know that. There is also plenty that is edited out of his story here. But also that means there is plenty that is readily available and easy to access. If you look at our show notes for today's episode, you will find plenty of things that he wrote and people wrote about him. Also. We just have to say right out of the gate, this man had spectacular sideburns.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Thomas Henry Huxley was born May 4, 1825 in Ealing, England. Today that is part of London. At the time, it was a village outside of London, but the city eventually just absorbed it. It became part of the greater city through urban expansion. His father, George, was A schoolmaster who ran a small but respected school for boys. George and his wife Rachel had seven children and Thomas was the youngest. Only six of those children lived past infancy, though Thomas was born in their home, which was an apartment above a butcher shop. And he wrote a humorous story about his early childhood later in his life saying, quote, I am not aware that any portents preceded my arrival in this world, but in my childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open in consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably a neighboring beehive had swarmed and the new colony pitching on the windowsill was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the Sasha. If that well meaning woman had only abstained from her ill timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which in this country leads far more surely than worth, capacity or honest work to the highest places in church and state. But the opportunity was lost and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean by in the plainest of plain language than which I suppose there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement beyond that. He wrote, quote, I have next to nothing to say about my childhood. I love him.

[Holly Frey]

And I know that was a long story to read, but I wanted to include it because it really sets you up for what you're going to get from Thomas Huxley. He's a little self deprecating all the time, but he's also very simultaneously able to kind of stick a little jab in at what he thinks is the pompous nature of a lot of the institutions of English society. And also, I don't know why getting stung by bees would have made him more eloquent, but I think it was

[Tracy V. Wilson]

that they would alight. Oh, they would alight onto his mouth and give him the gift of speech. Not that they would sting him, they

[Holly Frey]

would make him buzz and buzz. Although Thomas grew up in an educator's household, he only had two years of formal schooling. He attended his father's school starting at age 8, but the school closed in 1837 and that was the end of that. George moved out of education and he moved into a career in banking. The family did continue to struggle financially and from the age of 10 on, Thomas's education was entirely self directed. It wasn't like they could afford to send him to a school. His father had amassed a significant library, though, through his teaching, so Thomas just decided he would sort of work his way through that. He not only read books in English, but he also taught himself French and German, so he could read books written in those languages as well, including the works of Descartes and Goethe.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Although his father had been a teacher, it was Rachel, his mother, who he really credited with giving him the gift of natural intelligence. He wrote of her quote, with no more education than other women of the middle class in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, I cannot help it. Things flash across me. That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength. It has often stood me in good stead. It has sometimes played me sad tricks and it has always been a danger. But after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit.

[Holly Frey]

Though Huxley was raised in an Anglican family, by the time he was a teenager, he was starting to question religion and is often described as having aligned with the dissenters of 19th century England who rebelled against the dogma of the Church of England and sought their own path. Throughout his life, Huxley moved farther and farther away from religion as he examined its place in the human social structure and viewed it from a progressively more scientific lens.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

When he was 13, Huxley was apprenticed to John Charles Cook, a doctor who was also his sister Ellen's husband. Encyclopedia Britannica describes Cook as a medical materialist, meaning someone who believes that all maladies, including psychological ones, trace back to a physical problem. But Holly didn't find much about Cook anywhere to really verify that. Huxley didn't stay with Cook for long, though, and eventually moved on to a different apprenticeship in London with a doctor who served the city's poor. But Huxley acknowledged that medicine, in terms of actually treating patients, had never been a passion for him. He was really just interested in physiology and was trying to find a way out of poverty.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, it's said that he was really very struck by the horrible circumstances that London's poor were living in, and that part of his apprenticeship really impacted the way he thought about education for the rest of his life and what he could do to help people. Huxley described once going to an autopsy with his friends as a boy, drawn there because he was interested in physiology, and he described what he called dissection poisoning. Although in this account where he talks about it, he says that he didn't cut himself in any way, like there was no place for anything kind of dangerous to enter his skin or his bloodstream. But even so, he didn't get better. He continued to get sick and he describes having to go to the country to a farm to get better, stating quote, I soon recovered, but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of internal pain and from that time my constant friend hypochondriacal dyspepsia commenced his half century of co tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

At the age of 17, Huxley had acquired enough knowledge and the ability to apply it that he was given a scholarship to study medicine. This was through the Charing Cross Hospital at London University and Huxley met this opportunity with enthusiasm. He won a gold medal for his achievement in anatomy and physiology from the school. Just after Huxley's graduation from London University in 1845, he made his first mark on the scientific world through his observations of hair follicles under a microscope. He identified a layer between the outer layer and the interior cuticle that gives hair its strength by connecting keratin filaments and that is now known as Huxley's layer.

[Holly Frey]

We will talk about Huxley's next somewhat surprising career move after we pause for a sponsor break

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[Holly Frey]

In 1846, Thomas Huxley joined the Royal Navy. This was, by his account, something one of his friends encouraged him to do. So he had graduated from medical school, but he was still too young to become a member of the College of Surgeons and he needed some kind of income. So his friend suggested that he write to the Director General for the Medical Service of the Navy, Sir William Burnett. And Huxley actually thought this was way too forward. But he was desperate enough that he did it anyway. And to his surprise, Burnett asked him to meet and after a brief interview, Huxley was in the Navy. Because of his medical background, he was assigned first to Haslar Hospital and then several months later to the HMS Rattlesnake. As the ship's assistant surgeon. The Rattlesnake had orders to embark on a multi year mission to the South Pacific. Huxley describes this time on this journey as exceptionally rough, but he also said it was really good for him, stating, quote, it was good for me to live under sharp discipline, to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessities, to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank with the sky for canopy and cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast and more especially to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The Rattlesnake was on a surveying mission and in addition to fulfilling his daily work duties, Huxley took on a side project. He studied sea anemones and jellyfish throughout the voyage and he compiled his findings into a paper that he sent to the Royal Society in 1849. That paper was titled on the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of the Medusae. But he never heard anything back from the Society. Upon his return to London in 1850, he was very surprised to learn that his paper had been received, published and lauded by the scientific community. Pubsley also came home an engaged man. While he was on that journey, he met A young woman while the ship was docked in Sydney, Australia. Her name was Henrietta Ann Heathorn. The two of them fell in love and they agreed to be married. But when the ship left, it wasn't like Henrietta could just go with them. So she agreed to wait for Thomas in Sidney until the time came that they could be together.

[Holly Frey]

In 1851, because of his paper on anemones and other critters, Huxley became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He continued his naval career for a while, but he was also always working on his own research projects. A year after he became a Fellow, he submitted a paper on invertebrate animals and he won a gold medal for it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Huxley had a couple of factors leading him away from his military career in the early 1850s. For one, he was feeling ready to transition into research being his full time occupation. For another, there were arguments between the Admiralty and the scientific community about whether the Navy should pay for some of the printing costs of Huxley's work. That was not out of the blue. The military had made promises that they would support and encourage officers doing scientific work. But after several years of back and forth, the Navy, according to Huxley, quote, cut short the discussion by ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do. So he was on his own in London without a job. And if he had been born into

[Holly Frey]

a wealthy family, this is the point where he could have just set up his own lab and dedicated himself to research while living off the family fortune. A lot of people we've talked about on the show have done just that. But Huxley needed a job, and leaving the stability of the Navy was actually a pretty risky move. But he didn't only want to fund his research. He also wanted to make enough money that he could send for Henrietta and bring her to London so that they could start a life together.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Huxley had already made a name for himself, and because of that name, he landed two jobs. One was as a curator at the Museum of Practical Geography. The other was a professor position at the Royal School of Mines, where he was to teach paleontology and natural history. This was not a job he actually wanted because he was not an expert at paleontology. So he accepted the job provisionally. He wrote that he told his new employer, quote, that I did not care for fossils and that I should give up natural history as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for 31 years and a large part of my work has been paleontological. Neither of Huxley's new positions was especially high paying. But the two combined meant that he could finally send for Henrietta. And they got married in 1855.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, they were by all accounts, very, very happy together. In his 30s, Huxley committed himself fully to promoting the new ideas arising in science. And this often meant that he was at odds with the establishment, because so much of thought and culture in Britain, Europe and the US was built around biblical ideology. And a lot of the emerging science was very counter to that. This was a period of time when scientists were really focusing on the origin of humans, which even today gets people riled up sometimes. So you can imagine how contentious it could be for an idea like evolution to be introduced in 19th century England. But though Huxley was eager to understand where human life began, that didn't mean that he supported all scientific ideas that explored that topic.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1809, French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck had published a book titled Philosophie Zoologique. That book built on work that Lamarck had been doing for years, and it laid out the origin of life as having been the result of spontaneous generation with regards to the simplest forms of life, and then suggested that two drivers led to more complex forms of life. One was what he called the power of life, which he described as a natural progression toward increased complexity. The other was an environmental effect. The needs of an organism's environment would cause them to adopt various behaviors for survival, and those behaviors would change their bodies and those changes would be inherited by their offspring. The classic example that he used for this was giraffes. He made the case that as they stretched to reach high leaves in trees for food, their necks elongated and that that elongation made it into subsequent generations. Of course, that was incorrect, but it was the beginning of scientific discourse about evolution.

[Holly Frey]

And Huxley, writing several decades later about it, thought that Lamarck had some really interesting ideas, but that he was not correct in his assessment and that he had made some leaps that were not really supported by any kind of scientific evidence. He wrote, quote lamarck sagacious as many of his views were mingled them with so much that was crude and even absurd as to neutralize the benefit which his originality might have affected had he been a more sober and cautious thinker.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1844, Robert Chambers published a book titled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. No one knew that it was Chambers who wrote it. The book was published anonymously, and Chambers, who was a Scottish publisher, was not revealed to be the author until 40 years later. He had withheld his name because he knew it would be Controversial and he didn't want the potential Fuhrer to destroy his livelihood. He was really correct to be worried about this. This was not a case where he was a scientist who had discovered something so new that that it would break people's understanding of the world. He was parroting things that a bunch of other people had claimed and kind of combining them into one scientific history of the world from the beginning to the point where humans appeared. And the work repeated a lot of things that the scientific community had already dismissed as incorrect and in some cases even silly.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, it was like he did no vetting. He read the Internet and said, I did my research. And he wrote one big paper about it. And then everyone was like, oh my dude, that's not, that's not it.

[Nick Turturro]

No.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Nope.

[Holly Frey]

Huxley's writing about this work is frequently described as scathing. Scathing is the word almost everyone uses. And that is really pretty accurate. He wrote, quote, we grudge no man either the glory or the profit to be obtained from charlatanry. And we can hardly expect that those who are so ignorant of science as to be misled by the vestiges will read what we have to say upon the subject. But a book may, like a weed, acquire an importance by neglect which it could have attained in no other mode. And therefore it becomes our somewhat unpleasant duty to devote a few of our pages to an examination of some of the leading points of this once attractive and still notorious work of fiction. Indeed, we feel the more called upon to undertake this criticism at present, since as we shall see, the, the vestigerian has bolstered up his case by the use of names and authorities which, were it justifiable, might give a certain value to his statements.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

But then in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which changed science forever. And it became a pivotal work in Huxley's life and career. Unlike the Lamarck and Chambers writing on evolution, Darwin's work captured Huxley's attention and, and that started before it was ever published. Darwin had brought the work to Huxley for review before it went to print. And Huxley had made an in depth study of the manuscript and he felt that the reasoning and science of natural selection as outlined in Darwin's work really stood up. The reason why Huxley got the nickname of Darwin's bulldog was because he was comfortable embracing the conflict around this controversial writing and just toeing up with the detractors. But Darwin was not.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, it was like Darwin was like, I don't want to fight about this. And Huxley was like, oh I will bring it on. We are going to talk about some of these debates after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff youf Missed in History Class going

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Holly Frey]

Allow eight weeks what's up fam?

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Hey, what's up y'?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

All?

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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Naomi, you get the Palm for that.

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[Holly Frey]

Huxley got into a lot of public debates about Darwin's writing, and the most famous of those was a formal debate staged at Oxford University on June 30, 1860. It has actually come to be known as the Great Debate, and this event was part of the ceremony to open the new University Museum, and it pitted Huxley against Samuel Wilberforce, who was the Bishop of Oxford. Wilberforce was a fellow of the Royal Society in addition to being a leader in the Anglican Church. So it wasn't like he didn't know about talking about science. He was a very strong public speaker and he was there to defend creation as it is portrayed in the Bible as the true origin of man. There is Actually, no full, detailed account of how the debate played out that evening. I sure wish there were, and I know I'm not the only one. But there is a moment that has lived on in accounts of the debate and has been told by many people. It was written about by a lot of people that were there. And this moment is one in which Wilberforce tries to throw the theory of evolution in Huxley's face by suggesting that if he believes this, that means he has to acknowledge that one of his forebears must have been an ape. And Huxley famously replied, quote, if then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence, and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion. I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. You'll see other variations of that sentiment that are written a little bit differently because, again, we're getting them through everybody's secondhand accounts, but they all say essentially the same thing, like they're very pro ape. The room where that debate took place and where Wilberforce is recognized as having kind of gotten the smackdown is known as the Huxley room today, and it houses more than 1 million insect specimens.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Huxley's story and his writing also offer up an opportunity to sort of set the record straight regarding humanity's place in the order of things and what Darwin did and didn't say about it. A lot of people who argue against the idea that humanity and apes share a common ancestor kind of blame that idea on Darwin when it was really Huxley who went hard on it. Darwin's writing in on the Origin of Species did not ever make the leap to saying anything about the humans. And this discussion of various species having common ancestors, he literally puts off the question, including it as an example of something that will likely be researched later. He states, quote, in the distant future, I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity. By gradation, light will be thrown. On the origin of man and his history. He would eventually write about humankind's origins, but not for more than a decade after. On the Origin of Species.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, and at that point, he is kind of building on what Huxley was about to put forward, because Huxley, unlike Darwin, was willing to jump into the fray regarding humankind's evolution. Four years after Darwin's book came Out Huxley published evidence as to man's place in nature, and in it he makes the case that humans and great apes should be in the same taxonomical class, namely Mammalia. He knew this was going to be difficult for people to accept, and he addressed it in the work, and he suggests in the writing that we pretend we are from another planet and observing humans as a specimen without our own baggage to make all of these ideas easier to accept. Writing quote. Bearing this obvious course of zoological reasoning in mind, let us endeavor for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity. Let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular erect and featherless biped, which some enterprising traveler, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection. Well preserved, maybe in a cask of rum we should all at once agree upon. Placing him among the mammalian vertebrates, and his lower jaw, his molars and his brain would leave no room for doubting the systematic position of the new genus among those mammals whose young are nourished during gestation by means of a placenta, or what are called the placental mammals. So he's basically like, just pretend you don't know you're a human and you're looking at this very objectively. It's so obvious they're connected. Although Huxley was promoting concepts that he knew were going to cause a lot of controversy and disdain, particularly from religious quarters, he viewed even that conflict as a necessary step in moving humankind's understanding of the world from forward.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Huxley was examining the silty, deep sea mud from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean when he noticed something that he thought might be important. Incidentally, that mud sample was collected by the vessel HMS Cyclops while it was surveying for the best route for the transatlantic telegraph cable. We talked about that on the show all the way back in November of 2016. And while the Cyclops was still at sea, the mud that it gathered was examined under a microscope, and it was seen to be, quote, full of minute shells. So by the time Huxley had it, there was already some speculation about it having some kind of minuscule forms of life in it. That was something that everybody involved was really excited about. Huxley dubbed these coccoliths, and that was a name that stuck. There was not a huge surge of research about them, though, and they seemed to drop out of the consciousness of the scientific community.

[Holly Frey]

But then, in 1868, Huxley revisited the mud which had been preserved in a jar for more than a decade at that point. And at that point it appeared that there might be a living substance in the mud. Huxley observed what he described as, quote, innumerable lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance that had not been there before. Then he examined these lumps and he found that they contained coccoliths as well as other foreign bodies and granules. Through testing he came to the conclusion that he described in his paper about it, which was titled on some Organisms Living at Great Depths in the North Atlantic Ocean. And he described it this way, quote, the granule heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded in represent masses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which characterize the radiolaria and a dead spherozoom would very nearly resemble one of the masses of this deep sea urskleime, which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his monographie der Monoran. I propose to confer upon this new owner the generic name of Bathybius and to call it after the eminent professor of zoology in the University of Jena, B. Hekeli. The scientist that he's talking about there and for whom he wanted to name this was Ernst Haeckel, who was very flattered by this situation.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

B was entered into the zoological record that same year and it became the source of a lot of scientific interest as researchers tried to analyze its purpose place in the understanding of the origin of life. Additional samples were collected and similar findings were made with them until the expedition of the HMS Challenger, which began in 1872. A chemist named Buchanan was on board the ship and he conducted some experiments of his own on the four year voyage. He had noticed that their samples that were kept in plain seawater did not form globules like Huxley's samples had. But when he added alcohol to the seawater, it spawned a precipitate. What Huxley had found was not protoplasm spawning life. He had just misidentified a chemical reaction of calcium sulfate or gypsum combining with alcohol.

[Holly Frey]

When Huxley was informed of this information, bless him, he did not get indignant, he did not get in a big fight about it. He wrote a letter to the editor of Nature for publication in which he acknowledged his embarrassing error with very good humor, stating, quote, if you have read Your Shakespeare, you would know what it is to mean by eating a leek. Well, every honest man has to do that now and then. And I assure you that if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood, particularly in people of sanguine temperament. He also stated, my poor dear Bathybius appears likely to turn out to be a blunderbuss. And he stated that he intended to always set the record straight at every opportunity. If anyone was walking around with the misinformation that he had promoted and he did that, he'd lived that out the entirety of his life.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

While he was absolutely willing to admit this error, what he would not do was let other people use his gaff to try to discourage credit science. George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyle, was particularly enthusiastic about using this mistake to claim that all of the theory of evolution was ridiculous. Huxley responded by saying, quote, the most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

[Holly Frey]

Thomas Huxley, who had gained his vast knowledge through self directed study, believed very deeply that education was for everyone. And he used this position, as he became a well recognized intellectual, to give other people an opportunity for education and in a way that actually tried to decrease the divide between intellectuals and average people. In the 1850s, he started a project called the Working Man Lectures, which sought to demystify science and showed that it was for everyone. These were talks that were open to anyone who wished to attend, and they were particularly targeted to adults who, like him, did not get a formal education in their youth. And he laid out in really easy to understand terms the ideas that were being bandied about by the Royal Society. And he made clear to any attendees that science was really just a matter of observing things, questioning them and examining evidence.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

His advocacy for education for all was really for all, not just for men, but also for women. In 1874, he was one of the founders of the London School of Medicine for Women. This effort was in conjunction with names that have appeared on our show before, including Sophia Jex Blake and Elizabeth Blackwell. The doctor, not the botanical illustrator that we just talked about. They were also both involved in the school's founding. Additionally, he helped put together curricula for teachers to teach science so that educators in small towns and more rural areas could benefit from the same information that was readily available in the cities.

[Holly Frey]

At the age of 68, Huxley published Evolution and Ethics, a book which sought to lay out ways that Believing in the information that science could show, rather than just following religious faith, did not mean that morality was left out of the equation. Huxley made the case that ethics were a vital part of humankind's survival and that if everyone is treated ethically, both the individual and the larger group are going to benefit and have a better outcome. Huxley is also often credited with coining the term agnostic, and he was definitely using it in his writing by the 1860s. Throughout his life, he often wrote about the unknowability of a supreme being and how justice with science, a person should look at available evidence when assessing matters of morality. In an 1889 essay titled Agnosticism in Christianity, he wrote, quote, the extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems, the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual. Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable. What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. He had also included a reference to a footnote after the word unknowable, which is sort of charming. He says in that footnote quote, I confess that long ago, I once or twice made this mistake even to the waist of a capital, um. And, you know, it's set in 1893. So basically, he went from the unknowable being a capitalized thing as being, you know, kind of a reference to some sort of deity to be like, it doesn't even get a capital letter for me anymore.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The last dozen years of Huxley's life included a series of challenges. His daughter Marion started to have mental health issues. She's described as having gone mad, although the specifics are not very clear. Clear. This happened as Huxley was already stretched a bit thin after touring North America giving lectures about the connections between birds and dinosaurs, and he was still continuously engaged in debates about science. He was basically living with a lot of stress. And Marion's mental illness really seemed to have kind of broken him.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, he lived his life in a constant online argument. Basically, everyone was always coming for him because they knew he was the mouthpiece of evolution and evolutionary science. He had been made president of the Royal Society in 1883, but he resigned that post in 1885 as his family faced the strain of what was going on with Marian. He also stopped lecturing, and at that point, the Prime Minister, in recognition of Huxley's Lifetime of work gave him a state pension of 1,200 pounds a year. His health really began to decline by the start of the 1890s. He had issues with his lungs and his heart, and he moved to the seaside in Sussex in the hopes that getting out of London would help. London was having a very bad smog problem at the time. Thomas Huxley died of heart failure on June 29, 1895.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1907, Huxley's widow Henrietta published a book of Thomas's writings that she had selected. It was titled Aphorisms and Reflections. She wrote the preface to it and no doubt accidentally bolstered this misunderstanding about what Huxley had actually said about the origin of man. But it's a lovely tribute to him. Quote, Thomas Henry Huxley may come to be remembered by the public merely as a man who held that we were descended from the ape, or as the apostle of Darwinism, or as the man who worsted Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford. To prevent such limitation, and to afford more intimate and valuable reasons for the remembrance of this man of science and lover of his fellow men, I have gathered together passages on widely differing themes. Some of the passages were picked out for their philosophy, some for their moral guidances, some for their scientific exposition of natural facts or for their insight into social questions. Others for their charms of imagination or genial humor. And many, not the least, for their pure beauty of lucid English writing. I hope that these selections may attract the attention of the working man whose cause my husband so ardently espoused and to whom he was the first to reveal by his free lectures the loveliness of nature, the many rainbow colored rays of science, and to show forth to his listeners how all these glorious rays unite in the one pure white light of holy truth.

[Holly Frey]

They were both very good writers. Yeah, yeah. I just feel like hanging out at their house, listening to them speak. Must have been terrific.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Well, and he thought he was so bad at it because the bees never visited.

[Holly Frey]

But he was a terrific writer, just in case you were wondering. Writer Aldous Huxley was Thomas Huxley's grandson. In fact, several of his grandsons were quite impressive and continued Huxley's legacy in science. His grandson, Andrew Fielding Huxley, won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Sir John Carew Echols.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Quote.

[Holly Frey]

For their discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane. Chip off the old block. And his grandson, Julian Sorrell Huxley, was UNESCO's first director and one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund. So quite a family to be a part of. Yeah, I really like him and boy do I love his writing. He's so quotable. I spent a lot of time just reading things he wrote that really had no place in the podcast.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, you have some listener mail for us.

[Holly Frey]

I do. This is from our listener Melanie, who writes hi. First of all, I love your podcast. My teenager recently asked me a history question and when I said I didn't know the answer and we should look it up, he looked at me and said, I thought you would have heard about it in that podcast you listened to. I love to talk about the things I learn at the dinner table. I'm not sure my kids love it as much as I do, though. I am writing because recently you shared a reader's email about kids in historical clothing, so I thought it would be fun to share a few of our family holiday card pictures. Back in 2017, I decided I was bored with doing whatever everyone else was doing for their cards and opted to use my theater costuming background to be a little creative. Each year I choose an era and make historical clothing for my entire family. I like to make the card look as close to a card or photograph might have in the time it is set, or as close to what I imagine they would do if they had the technology to do it. It has been a very fun journey. I'm sending you my three favorite, which were hard to choose, as well as a picture of our frog for pet tax. We have many pets, but I haven't heard anyone sharing a frog yet. And Moss, named after Richard Ioade's character from the IT crowd, is adorable. Moss is adorable. These pictures of her family are so stinking cute. The one that I There were two that I really, really love. I mean, they're all great. One, though, is like 1950s wear for everybody and it looks like they're essentially on the first opening day of Disneyland. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen in your life. Another is them in Victorian bathing costumes, which is also near and dear to my heart. And then there's a third one where they might have been hobbits. I'm not remembering because I printed them out and I looked at them, but we have since been on flights that made my brain break and my printout came out like my printer just had a fit. But that frog sure is cute. Moss is real cute. I have not watched the IT crowd.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Me neither.

[Holly Frey]

But I like that frog and I love frogs. I just think they're precious.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

They are.

[Holly Frey]

If you would like to write to us, you can do that@history podcastheartradio.com if you would like to look at the resources we use to make the show. As I said, there's a lot of Huxley writing and it is all in the show notes. You can look at [e-mail] you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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