Thomas Huxley 1825 – 1895

Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist, philosopher of science, and public lecturer, famous in his lifetime as Darwin's bulldog for his vigorous defense of evolutionary theory after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Largely self-taught, he rose from the British Navy's medical service to become the leading English popularizer of natural science and a fellow and President of the Royal Society. He coined the term agnosticism in 1869 to name his methodological refusal to assert claims that lacked sufficient evidence. His Evolution and Ethics, the Romanes Lecture of 1893, set out a celebrated argument that ethical progress works against, not with, the cosmic process.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing, near London, in May 1825, the seventh child of a struggling schoolmaster. He trained as an apprentice surgeon and at Charing Cross Hospital, won the Royal Society's medal for original work submitted from the four-year voyage of HMS Rattlesnake to the south Pacific (1846–1850), and was elected a Fellow of the Society at twenty-five. He was professor of natural history at the Royal School of Mines from 1854, lectured at the Royal Institution and to working-men, served on ten royal commissions on education and public health, and was president of the Royal Society from 1883 to 1885.

His books include Man's Place in Nature (1863), Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1866), Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (1870), the volume on Hume in the English Men of Letters series (1879), the collection Science and Culture (1881), and his late Romanes Lecture Evolution and Ethics (1893). He coined the word 'agnostic' in 1869 to describe his own theological stance.

Huxley was the most effective public defender of Darwinian evolution — 'Darwin's bulldog' — confronting Bishop Wilberforce at the 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association and writing tirelessly to bring evolutionary biology, comparative anatomy, and the new physical science into popular understanding and into the school and university curriculum. He died at Eastbourne in June 1895.