Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

This review was one of the few favourable notices, and naturally it delighted Darwin greatly. He wrote to Hooker about it: "Have you seen the splendid essay and notice of my book in the Times? I cannot avoid a strong suspicion that it is by Huxley; but I have never heard that he wrote in the Times. It will do grand service." On the same day, writing to Huxley himself, he said of the review:

"It included an eulogium of me which quite touched me, although I am not vain enough to think it all deserved. The author is a literary man and a German scholar. He has read my book attentively; but, what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a profound naturalist. He knows my barnacle book and appreciates it too highly. Lastly, he writes and thinks with quite uncommon force and clearness; and, what is even still rarer, his writing is seasoned with most pleasant wit. We all laughed heartily over some of the sentences.... Who can it be? Certainly I should have said that there was only one man in England who could have written this essay, and that you were the man; but I suppose that I am wrong, and that there is some hidden genius of great calibre; for how could you influence Jupiter Olympus and make him give you three and a half columns to pure science? The old fogies will think the world will come to an end. Well, whoever the man is, he has done great service to the cause."

The essay in the Times was followed shortly afterwards by a "Friday Evening Discourse" in 1860 on "Species, Races, and their Origin," in which Huxley, addressing a cultivated audience, laid the whole weight of his brilliant scientific reputation on the side of evolution. Next, in April, 1860, he published a long article in the Westminster Review, then a leading organ of advanced opinion, on The Origin of Species, some quotations from which article were made in the last chapter. Apart from its strong support of the doctrine of evolution, its whole-hearted praise of Darwin's achievements, and the clear way in which, while it showed the value of natural selection as the only satisfactory hypothesis in the field, it gave reasons for regarding it strictly as an hypothesis, the review is specially interesting as a contrast to reviews which appeared about the same time in the Edinburgh Review and in the Quarterly. Both these were not only exceedingly unfavourable, but were written in a spirit of personal abuse singularly unworthy of their authors and still more of their subject. The review in the Edinburgh had come as a particularly great shock to Darwin, Huxley, and their friends. Sir Richard Owen, in many ways, was at that time the most distinguished anatomist in England. He had been an ardent follower of Cuvier, and in England had carried on the palæontological work of the great Frenchman. He was a personal friend of the court, a well-known man in the best society, and in many ways a worthy upholder of the best traditions of science. In the particular matter of species, he was known to be by no means a firm supporter of the orthodox views. When Darwin's paper was read at the Linnæan Society, and afterwards when the Origin was published, the verdict of Owen was looked to with the greatest interest by the general public. For a time he wavered, and even expressed himself of the opinion that he had already in his published works included a considerable portion of Darwin's views. But two things seemed to have influenced him: First, Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and Sedgwick and Whewell, the two best-known men at Cambridge, urged him to stamp once for all, as he only could do, upon this "new and pernicious doctrine." Secondly, combined with his great abilities, he had the keenest personal interest in his own position as the leader of English science, and had no particular friendship for men or for views that seemed likely to threaten his own supreme position. In a very short time he changed from being neutral, with a tendency in favour of the new views, to being a bitter opponent of them. In scientific societies and in London generally, naturally enough he constantly came across the younger scientific men, such as Huxley and Hooker, who had declared for Darwin, and he made the irretrievable mistake of for a time attempting to disguise his opposition while he was writing the most bitter of all the articles against Darwinism. That appeared in the Edinburgh Review in April, 1860, and the range of knowledge it displayed, and the form of arguments employed, naturally enough betrayed the secret of its authorship, although Owen for very long attempted to conceal his connection with it. Darwin, who had the most unusual generosity towards his opponents, found this review too much for him. Writing to Lyell soon after its publication, he said:

"I have just read the Edinburgh, which, without doubt is by ——. It is extremely malignant, clever, and, I fear, will be very damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley's lecture, and very bitter against Hooker. So we three enjoyed it together. Not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I have quite got over it to-day. It requires much study to appreciate all the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did not discover all myself. It scandalously misrepresents many parts. He misquotes some passages, altering words within inverted commas.... It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which —— hates me."

As Owen was still alive when this letter was published in Darwin's Life, the authorship of the review was not actually mentioned; but it is necessary to mention it, as it justifies the sternness with which Huxley exposed Owen on an occasion shortly to be described. The review in the Quarterly was written by Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, in July, 1860, and almost at once the authorship of it became known to Darwin's friends. In connection with this, Huxley wrote in 1887, in Darwin's Life and Letters:

"I doubt if there was any man then living who had a better right (than Darwin) to expect that anything he might choose to say on such a question as the Origin of Species would be listened to with profound attention, and discussed with respect. And there was certainly no man whose personal character should have afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences. Yet such was the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that it was ever my good fortune to know; and years had to pass away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation ceased to be the most notable constituents of the majority of the multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press. I am loth to rake up any of these ancient scandals from their well-deserved oblivion; but I must make good a statement which may seem overcharged to the present generation, and there is no pièce justificative more apt for the purpose or more worthy of such dishonour than the article in the Quarterly Review for July, 1860. Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a 'flighty' person who endeavours to 'prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable to natural science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, 'Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men'; who is so ignorant of palæontology that he can talk of the 'flowers and fruits' of the plants of the carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of venomous snakes to be 'entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves'; of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, 'what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?' Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between astronomy, geology, and theology leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot 'consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the Word of Revelation,' but for all that he devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory 'contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its Creator,' and is 'inconsistent with the fulness of His glory.'"

In a footnote to this passage, Huxley wrote that he was not aware when writing these lines that the authorship of the article had been avowed publicly. He adds, however:

"Confession unaccompanied by penitence, however, affords no ground for mitigation of judgment; and the kindliness with which Mr. Darwin speaks of his assailant, Bishop Wilberforce, is so striking an exemplification of his singular gentleness and modesty, that it rather increases one's indignation against the presumption of his critic."

As a matter of fact Wilberforce was a man of no particular information in letters or in philosophy, and his knowledge of science was of the vaguest: a little natural history picked up from Gosse, the naturalist of the seashore, in the course of a few days' casual acquaintance at the seaside, and some pieces of anatomical facts with which he was provided, it is supposed, by Owen, for the purposes of the review. But he bore a great name, and misused a great position; he was a man of facile intelligence, smooth, crafty, and popular, and in this case he was convinced that he was doing the best possible for the great interests of religion by authoritatively denouncing a man whose character he was incapable of realising, and on whose work he was incompetent to pronounce an opinion. Against an enemy of this kind, Huxley was implacable and relentless. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating pretentious ignorance, and he had realised from the first that there could be no question of giving and taking quarter from persons who were more concerned to suppress doctrines they conceived to be dangerous than to examine into their truth. On the other hand, much as Huxley disliked Owen's devious ways, and although in after life there occurred many and severe differences of opinion between Huxley and Owen, Huxley had a sincere respect for much of Owen's anatomical and palæontological work, and when, in 1894, Owen's Life was published, one of the most interesting parts of it was a long, fair, and appreciative review by Huxley of Owen's contributions to knowledge.

The middle of 1860, however, was not a time for Huxley, in his capacity as Darwin's chief defender, to make truce with the enemy. In England a certain number of well-known scientific men had given a general support to Darwinism. From France, Germany, and America there had come some support and a good deal of cold criticism, but most people were simmering with disturbed emotions. The newspapers and the reviews were full of the new subject; political speeches and sermons were filled with allusions to it. Wherever educated people talked the conversation came round to the question of evolution. Were animals and plants the results of special creations, or were they, including man, the result of the gradual transformations of a few simple primitive types evolving under the stress of some such force as Darwin's natural selection? To many people it seemed to be a choice between a world with God and a world without God; and the accredited defenders of religion gathered every force of argument, of misrepresentation, conscious and unconscious, of respectability, and of prejudice to crush once for all the obnoxious doctrine and its obnoxious supporters. In the autumn of that year it fell that the meeting of the British Association, then coming into prominence as the annual parliament of the sciences, was to be held at Oxford. It was inevitable that evolution should be debated formally and informally in the sessions of the Association, and it must have seemed to the orthodox that there, in that beautiful city, its air vibrant with tinkling calls to faith, its halls and libraries crowded with the devout and the learned, its history and traditions alike calling on all to defend the old fair piety, in such an uncongenial air, the supporters of evolution must be overwhelmed. Almost the whole weight of the attack had to be resisted by Huxley. In the various sectional meetings he had combat after combat with professors and clerics. Of these dialectic fights the most notable were one with Owen on the anatomical structure of the brain, and another with Wilberforce upon the general question of evolution. Owen contended that there were anatomical differences not merely of degree but of kind between the brain of man and the brain of the highest ape, and his remarks were accepted by the audience as a complete and authoritative blow to the theory of descent. Huxley at once met Owen with a direct and flat contradiction, and pledged his reputation to justify his contradiction with all due detail on a further occasion. As a matter of fact, he did justify the contradiction, and no anatomist would now dream of attempting the support of the proposition rashly made by Owen; but, at the time, the position of Owen and the sympathies of the audience took away much of their effect from Huxley's words. Two days later, Wilberforce, in a scene of considerable excitement, made a long, eloquent, and declamatory speech against evolution and against Huxley. From the incomplete reports of the debate that were published, it is difficult to gain a very clear idea of the Bishop's speech; but it is certain that it was eloquent and facile, and that it appealed strongly to the religious prejudices of the majority of the audience. He ended by a gibe which, under ordinary circumstances, might have passed simply as the rude humour of a popular orator, but which in that electric atmosphere stung Huxley into a retort that has become historical. He asked Huxley whether he was related by his grandfather's or grandmother's side to an ape. Huxley replied: