HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY English bi ologist, was born on May 4, 1825 at Ealing, the son of a school master. Of education in the formal sense he received none. "I had two years of a pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten), and after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direc tion till I reached manhood" (Life, ii. 145). When his father moved to Coventry about 1835, young Huxley was left to his own devices. His great desire to be a mechanical engineer, ended in his devotion to "the mechanical engineering of living ma chines." His curiosity in this direction was nearly fatal; a post mortem he was taken to between 13 and 14 was followed by an illness which seems to have been the starting-point of the ill-health which pursued him all through life. At 15 he devoured Sir William Hamilton's Logic, and thus acquired a taste for meta physics. At 17 he came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle's writings. Fifty years later he wrote : "To make things clear and get rid of cant and shows of all sorts. This was the lesson I learnt from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life" (Life, ii. 268). At 17 Huxley, with his elder brother James, commenced regular medical studies at Charing Cross hospital, and on graduating in 1845 he published his first scientific paper, demonstrating the existence of a hitherto un recognized layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer since known as "Huxley's layer." Huxley passed the necessary examination, and at the same time obtained the qualification of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was "entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the `Victory,' for duty at Haslar Hospital." Its chief, Sir John Richardson, who was a well-known Arctic explorer and naturalist, recognized Hux ley's ability, and procured for him the post of surgeon to H.M.S. "Rattlesnake," about to start for surveying work in Torres strait. By the time the ship was ordered home after the lamented death of her captain at Sydney, to be paid off at Chatham in November 185o, Huxley had made a profound study of the surface-life of the tropical seas. He sent home "communication after communi cation to the Linnean society," then a somewhat somnolent body, "with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of the ark" (Essays, i. 13) . However, his important paper, On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medu sae, was printed by the Royal Society in the Philosophical Trans actions in 1849. Huxley united, with the Medusae, the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps, to form a class which he subsequently named Hydrozoa. He found that all the members of the class consisted of two membranes enclosing a central cavity or stom ach, and wisely compared the two layers with those which ap pear in the germ of the higher animals. The consequences which have flowed from this prophetic generalization of the ectoderm and endoderm are familiar to every student of evolution. After returning to England in 185o Huxley was elected F.R.S. in 1851, and in the following year received the Royal medal when 26 and was elected to the council. With absolutely no aid from any one he had placed himself in the front rank of English scientific men. He secured the friendship of Sir J. D. Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty re tained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, in order that he might work up the observations he had made during the voyage of the "Rattlesnake." He was thus enabled to produce various important memoirs, especially those on certain Ascidians, in which he solved the problem of Appendicularia—an organism whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Muller had found himself wholly un able to assign—and on the morphology of the cephalous Mollusca. Richard Owen, then the leading comparative anatomist in Great Britain, was a disciple of Cuvier, and adopted largely from him the deductive explanation of anatomical fact from idealistic conceptions. He superadded the evolutionary theories of Oken, which were equally idealistic, but were altogether repugnant to Cuvier. Huxley would have none of either. Imbued with the methods of von Baer and Johannes Muller, his methods were purely inductive. He would not hazard any statement beyond what the facts revealed. He retained, however, as has been done by his successors, the use of archetypes, though they no longer represented fundamental "ideas" but generalizations of the essen tial points of structure common to the individual of each class. He had not wholly freed himself, however, from archetypal tram mels. "The doctrine that every natural group is organized of ter a definite archetype . . . seems to me as important for zoology as the doctrine of definite proportions for chemistry," and further : "There is no progression from a lower to a higher type, but merely a more or less complete evolution of one type" (Phil. Trans.). As Chalmers Mitchell points out, this statement is of great historical interest. Huxley definitely uses the word "evolu tion," and admits its existence within the great groups. He had not rid himself, however, of the notion that the archetype was a property permanently inherent in the group. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance he made in 1852, was unable to convert him to evolution in its widest sense (Life, i. 168). About the same time, in his first interview with Darwin, he expressed his belief "in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups," and was received with a humorous smile (Life, i. 169) .
After three years' nominal employment Huxley was ordered on active service. He resigned, as he was determined to continue his scientific work. In July 18S4 Huxley became lecturer at the School of Mines and naturalist to the Geological Survey in the year of his marriage with Miss H. A. Heathorn. His most im portant published work at this period was the Croonian Lecture of 1858 on "The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," in which he completely demolished by his inductive method, the idealistic, if in some degree evolutionary, views of its origin held by Richard Owen. This finally disposed of the "archetype," and may be said to have liberated the English anatomical school from the deduc tive method.
In 1859 The Origin of Species was published. This was a momentous event in the history of science, and not least for Huxley, who found in Darwin what he had failed to find in Lamarck and in Charles Lyell, namely, an intelligible hypothesis good enough as a working basis for evolution. The rigorous proof which Huxley demanded was the production of species sterile to one another by selective breeding (Life, i. 193) . He warned Darwin : "I will stop at no point as long as clear reason ing will carry me further" (Life, i. 172). Owen, who was at first favourably disposed to Darwin's theory, could not break with orthodoxy, and in his Rede Lecture asserted that man was clearly marked off from other animals by the anatomical structure of his brain. This was inconsistent with known facts, and was effectu ally refuted by Huxley in various papers and lectures, summed up in 1863 in Man's Place in Nature. This "monkey damnifica tion" of mankind was too much even for the "veracity" of Carlyle, who is said to have never forgiven it. Meanwhile Huxley had been drawn into palaeontological research. Numerous memoirs on fossil fishes established many far-reaching morphological facts. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating, in the course of lectures on birds, delivered at the College of Surgeons in 1867, the fundamental affinity of the two groups which he united under the title of Sauropsida. An incidental result of the same course was his proposed rearrangement of the zoological regions into which P. L. Sclater had divided then world in 1857. Huxley anticipated, to a large extent, the results at which botanists have since arrived; he proposed as primary divisions, Arctogaea to include the land areas of the northern hemisphere—and Noto gaea for the remainder. Successive waves of life originated in and spread from the northern area, the survivors of the more ancient types firiding successively a refuge in the south. In 1892 he wrote : "The doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalization of certain facts ... classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology" (Essays, v. 42). Earlier in 1881 he had asserted even more emphatically that if the hypothesis of evolution "had not existed, the palaeontologist would have had to invent it" (Essays, iv. 44) From 187o onwards Huxley was more and more drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. From 1862 to 1884 he served on no less than ten Royal Commissions; from 1871 to 1880 he was a secretary of the Royal Society, and from 1881 to 1885 president ; and from 1870 to 1872 he served as a member of the newly constituted London School board. He re signed the latter position in 1872, but in the brief period during which he acted, probably more than any man, he left his mark on the foundations of national elementary education. He made war on the scholastic methods which wearied the mind in merely taxing the memory; the children were to be prepared to take their place worthily in the community. Physical training was the basis ; domestic economy, at any rate for girls, was insisted upon, and for all some development of the aesthetic sense by means of drawing and singing. Reading, writing and arithmetic were the indispensable tools for acquiring knowledge, and in tellectual discipline was to be gained through the rudiments of physical science. He insisted on the teaching of the Bible partly as a great literary heritage, partly because he was "seriously per plexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion in these matters, without its use" (Essays, iii. 397), and, again, because it was "the most democratic book in the world." In 1872 the School of Mines was moved to South Kensington, and Huxley had, for the first time after 18 years, those appliances for teaching beyond the lecture room, which to the lasting injury of the interests of biological science in Great Britain had been withheld from him by the short sightedness of government. Huxley had only been able to bring his influence to bear upon his pupils by oral teaching, and had had no opportunity by personal intercourse in the laboratory of forming a school. He was now able to organize a system of instruction for classes of elementary teachers in the general prin ciples of biology, which indirectly affected the teaching of the subject throughout the country. In 1892 he accepted a Privy Councillorship. The physical failure to meet the strain of his scien tific and public duties made rest imperative, and he took a long holiday in Egypt in 1873. He still continued to occupy himself with vertebrate morphology, but prevented by growing ill health from stooping over the microscope, and driven by attacks on Dar win and himself, he found an outlet for his energies in public ad dresses and more or less controversial writings. His health com pletely broke down in 1885. In 1890 he removed from London to Eastbourne, where after a painful illness he died on June 29, 1895.
The latter years of Huxley's life were mainly occupied with contributions to periodical literature on subjects connected with philosophy and theology. The only approach to certainty which he admitted lay in the order of nature. "If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation, but that universality cannot be proved by any amount of experience" (Essays, ix. 121). The assertion that "There is only one method by which intellectual truth can be reached, whether the subject-matter of investigation belongs to the world of physics or to the world of consciousness" (Es says, ix. 126) laid him open to the charge of materialism, which he vigorously repelled. "Legitimate materialism, that is, the extension of the conceptions and of the methods of physical science to the highest as well as to the lowest phenomena of vitality, is neither more nor less than a sort of shorthand ideal ism" (Essays, i. 194). While "the substance of matter is a metaphysical unknown quality of the existence of which there is no proof . . . the non-existence of a substance of mind is equally arguable ; . . . the result . . . is the reduction of the All to co-existences and sequences of phenomena beneath and beyond which there is nothing cognoscible" (Essays, ix. 66). As regards miracles, he wrote : "nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be"; this "knocks the bottom out of all a priori objections either to ordinary `miracles' or to the efficacy of prayer" (Essays, v. 133). In 186o he asserted : "Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God" (Life, i. 219) . In 1885 he formulated "the perfect ideal of religion" in a passage which has become famous : "In the 8th century B.C. in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of re ligion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. `And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God' " (Essays, iv. 161). Two years later he was writing: "That there is no evidence of the existence of such a being as the God of the theologians is true enough" (Life, ii. 162) ; he never really advanced beyond the recognition of "the passionless impersonality of the unknown and unknowable, which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena" (Life, i. 239), though he insisted that "atheism is on purely philosophical grounds untenable" (Life, ii. 162). In other respects his personal creed was a kind of scientific Calvinism. From 188o onwards Huxley was occupied in a campaign against orthodox beliefs. He threw Christianity overboard bodily on the grounds that "the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain" (Essays, v. 348). His final analy sis of what "since the second century, has assumed to itself the title of Orthodox Christianity" is a "varying compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain people of the Western world" (Essays, v. 142). He did not omit, however, to do justice to "the bright side of Christianity," and was deeply impressed with the life of Catherine of Siena. He compared the moral with the aesthetic sense, which he repeatedly declares to be intuitive and in the Romanes Lecture for 1894, defined "law and morals" to be "restraints upon the struggle for existence between men in society." Apparently he thought that the moral sense in its origin was intuitional and in its de velopment utilitarian. "The cosmic process has no sort of rela tion to moral ends" (Essays, ix. p. 83) ; "of moral purpose I see no trace in nature. That is an article of exclusive human manu facture" (Life, ii. 268). The cosmic process gives rise to what is evil in man's moral life, and in the long run will get the best of the contest, and "resume its sway" when evolution enters on its down ward course (Essays, ix. p. 45).
As has been said, Huxley never accepted without qualification the Darwinian principle. He thought "transmutation may take place without transition" (Life, i. 173) and thereby anticipated the findings of modern research. He recognized the "struggle for existence" but not the gradual adjustment of the organism to its environment which is implied in "natural selection." In highly civilized societies he thought that the former was at an end (Essays, ix. 36) and had been replaced by the "struggle for en joyment" (l.c. p. 4o).