Thomas Henry Huxley | Huxley College of the Environment

Who was Thomas Henry Huxley?

Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley
English Biologist
(1825-85)

Thomas Henry Huxley was a controversial nineteenth century figure. In a tribute on May 4, 1925 H. L. Mencken (The Baltimore Evening Sun), author of literary criticism, theology, political theory, ethics and The American Language wrote:

Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century — perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time.
There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.
He found science a pretty intellectual plaything, with overtones of the scandalous; he left it the chief serious concern of civilized man.

On May 4, 1825, at Ealing, a third-rate London suburb, there was born Thomas Henry Huxley, the son of a schoolmaster…Huxley was educated in third-rate schools and studied what was then regarded as medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. In 1846, having no taste for medical practice, he joined the British Navy as an assistant surgeon, and was presently assigned to the Rattlesnake for a cruise in the South Seas. He was gone for four years. He came back laden with scientific material of the first importance, but the Admiralty refused to publish it, and in 1854 he resigned from the navy and took a professorship in the Royal School of Mines.

Thereafter, for forty years, he was incessantly active as teacher, as writer and as lecturer. No single outstanding contribution to human knowledge is credited to him. He was not so much a discoverer as an organizer...He was one of the most pertinacious fighters ever heard in this world, and one of the bravest. He attacked and defeated the natural imbecility of the human race. In his old age, the English, having long sneered at him, decided to honor him. They made him a privy counsillor (sic), and gave him the right to put “The Right Hon” in front of his name and “P.C.” after it. The same distinction was given at the same time to various shyster lawyers, wealthy soap manufacturers and worn-out politicians.

All of us owe a vast debt to Huxley, especially all of us of English speech, for it was he, more than any other man, who worked that great change in human thought which marked the Nineteenth Century. All his life long he flung himself upon authority — when it was stupid, ignorant and tyrannical. He attacked it with every weapon in his rich arsenal — wit, scorn, and above all, superior knowledge…

For Huxley was not only an intellectual colossus; he was also a great artist; he knew how to be charming. No man has ever written more nearly perfect English prose. There is a magnificent clarity in it; its meaning is never obscure for an instant. And it is adorned with a various and never-failing grace.