July 29, 2026 • 41 mins
Huxley is an example of having a good attitude about publicly acknowledging errors and learning from them. He earned the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog” for his very vocal support of Darwin’s work, and he wanted to promote science and education, particularly to people that didn’t normally have access to those things.
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- Bowen, Keith. “Thomas Henry Huxley.” Ebsco. 2024. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/thomas-henry-huxley
- Burkhardt, Richard W.. "Jean-Baptiste Lamarck". Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Dec. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Baptiste-Lamarck
- Darwin, Charles. “On the Origin of Species.” JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. London. 1859. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1228/1228-h/1228-h.htm
- Desmond, Adrian J. "Thomas Henry Huxley". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Jun. 2026, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Henry-Huxley
- Dolan, John R. “The famous and lesser-known illustrations of Thomas Huxley’s Bathybius.” History of Oceanography. International Commission of the History of Oceanography. https://oceansciencehistory.com/2020/07/13/the-famous-and-lesser-known-illustrations-of-thomas-huxleys-bathybius/
- “Freshwater Bathybius.” Nature 4, 49–50 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004049b0
- “The Great Debate.” University of Oxford Museum of Natural History. https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/great-debate
- “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” Understanding Evolution. Berkeley University. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/1800s/early-concepts-of-evolution-jean-baptiste-lamarck/
- Huxley, T.H. “Agnosticism.” K. Paul, Trench. London. 1889. https://archive.org/details/a622650700huxluoft/page/169/mode/1up
- Huxley, T.H. “Aphorisms and Reflections. From the Works of T. H. HUXLEY, Selected by
Henrietta A. Huxley. Macmillan and Co. London. 1907. Accessed online: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/Book/Aphor.html - Huxley, T.H. “Autobiography and Selected Essays.” Riverside College Classics. 1909. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1315/1315-h/1315-h.htm#link2H_4_0007
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- Huxley, T.H. “On Some Organisms Living at Great Depths in the North Atlantic Ocean.” Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science. viii., new Series, 1868, pp. 203-212. http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/SM3/bathy.html
- Huxley, T.H. “On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals.” Project Gutenberg eBook. 2001. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2932/pg2932-images.html
- Joshi RS. “The Inner Root Sheath and the Men Associated with it Eponymically.” Int J Trichology. 2011 Jan;3(1):57-62. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3129131/
- Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste. “Zoological Philosophy.” Macmillan. London. 1914. https://archive.org/details/ZoologicalPhilosophy
- Lyons, Sherrie L. “Thomas Henry Huxley : the evolution of a scientist.” Prometheus Books. New York. 1999.
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- “Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1963.” The Nobel Prize. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1963/summary/
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- Schwartz, Joel S. “Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley, and ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.’” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 23, no. 1, 1990, pp. 127–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331120
- “Thomas Henry Huxley.” Darwin Correspondence Project. University of Cambridge. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/thomas-henry-huxley
- “Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895).” Humanist Heritage. https://heritage.humanists.uk/thomas-henry-huxley/
- Tunstad, Erik. “Darwin's Bulldog: Thomas Huxley 200 Years.” Prosa. July 10, 2025.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm prayse A V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson. This is an.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Episode that we are recording while we are on a
visit to the Bahamas. We are in the studio at
Baha Mar 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
(00:37):
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 gaff and
then acknowledging errors and learning from them. He also is
sort of famously known by his nickname Darwin's Bulldog for
(00:58):
his very vocal support part 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
(01:20):
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,
(01:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
There's no way not to just know that there is.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
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. Thomas Henry Huxley was born
(02:26):
May fourth, eighteen twenty five and ealing England today.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
That is part of London.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
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
(02:52):
lived past infancy, though Thomas was born in their home,
which was an apartment above a butcher's shop, and he
wrote a humorous story about his early childhood later in
his life, saying quote, I am not aware that any
portence preceded my arrival in this world, But in my
childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner
(03:13):
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
(03:35):
down the sash. 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 molefluous 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,
(04:00):
and I have been obliged to content myself through life
with saying what I mean 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, and I know that was
a long story to read, but I wanted to include
(04:21):
it because it really sets you up for what they're
going to get from Thomas Huxley. He's a little of
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
(04:44):
know why getting stung by bees would have made him
more eloquent, but I think it was 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
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 eight,
(05:08):
but the school closed in eighteen thirty seven 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
ten 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,
(05:32):
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 Guerta. Although his father had
been a teacher, it was Rachel, his mother, who he
really credited with giving him the gift of natural intelligence.
(05:55):
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.
(06:16):
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 Zelle Huxley
(06:39):
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
nineteenth 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
(07:00):
examined its place in the human social structure and viewed
it from a progressively more scientific lens. When he was thirteen,
Huxley was apprenticed to John Charles Cook, a doctor who
was also his sister Ellen's husband. Encyclopedia Britannica described Cook
as a medical materialist, meaning someone who believes that all maladies,
(07:22):
including psychological ones, traced 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
(07:43):
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. Yeah,
it's said that he was really very struck by the
horrible soircumstances that London's poor were living in, and that
(08:03):
part of his apprenticeship really impacted the way he thought
about education for the rest of his life and what.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
He could do to help people.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Huxley described once going to an autopsy with his friends
as a boy drawn near 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
(08:34):
skin or his blood stream. 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
(08:57):
century of co tendancy of my flesh Lee Tabernacle. At
the age of seventeen, 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.
(09:17):
He won a gold medal for his achievement in anatomy
and physiology from the school. Just after Huxley's graduation from
London University in eighteen forty five, 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
(09:40):
strength by connecting keratin filaments, and that is now known
as Huxley's Layer. We will talk about Huxley's next somewhat
surprising career move after we pause for a sponsor break.
(10:02):
In eighteen forty six, 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 friends suggested that he write to
(10:22):
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
(10:46):
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 he 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
(11:07):
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
soul 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
(11:29):
bottom and I along with it. 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 eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
That paper was titled on.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
The Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of the Medusa,
but he never heard anything back from the Society. Upon
his return to London in eighteen fifty he was very
surprised to learn that his paper had been received, published
and lauded by the scientific community. Huxley also came home
an engaged man. While he was on that journey, he
(12:13):
met a young woman while the ship was docked in Sydney, Australia.
Her name was Henrietta Ann Heathorne. 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 Sydney until the time came that they could be together.
In eighteen fifty one, because of his paper on anemones
(12:36):
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.
Huxley had a couple of factors leading him away from
(12:56):
his military career in the early eighteen fifties. 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.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That was not out of the blue.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
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
(13:38):
had been born into 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
(14:01):
he could send for Henrietta and bring her to London
so that they could start.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
A life together.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
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
(14:29):
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 thirty
one years, and a large part of my work has
been paleontological. Neither of Huxley's new positions was especially high paying,
(14:54):
but the two combined meant that he could finally send
for Henrietta, and they got married in eighteen fifty five. Yeah,
they were, by all accounts, very very happy together. In
his thirties, 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
(15:15):
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 nineteenth century England.
(15:40):
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. In eighteen oh nine, French naturalist Jean
Baptiste Lamarque had published a book titled Philosophy Zoologice. That
book built on work that Lamarck had been doing for years,
(16:02):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:46):
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, and writing several decades later
about it, thought that Lamark had some really interesting ideas,
but that he was not correct in his assessment, and
(17:09):
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. In
(17:29):
eighteen forty four, 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 forty years later. He had
withheld his name because he knew it would be controversial
(17:51):
and he didn't want the potential fearer to destroy his livelihood.
He was really correct to be worried about this. This
was not a case where he was scientists who had
discovered something so new 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
(18:14):
to the point where humans appeared.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
And the work repeated a lot.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Of things that the scientific community had already dismissed as
incorrect and in some cases even silly.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Yeah, it was like he did no vetting.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
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 it.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
No, nope.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Uh. 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 grudged no man
either the glory or the prophet to be obtained from Charlotteanery.
And we can hardly expect that those who are so
ignorant of science as to be misled by the vestiges
(18:56):
will read what we have to say upon the subject.
But a book 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
(19:20):
upon to undertake this criticism at present, since, as we
shall see, the vestigiarian has bolstered up his case by
the use of names and authorities which were justifiable might
give a certain value to his statements. But then, in
eighteen fifty nine, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species,
which changed science forever, and it became a pivotal work
(19:43):
in Huxley's life and career. Unlike the Lamarck and Chambers
writing on evolution, Darwin's work captured Huxley's attention, 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.
Andy felt that the reasoning and science of natural selection
(20:06):
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 towing up with the detractors.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
But Darwin was not Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
It was like Darwin was like, I don't want to
fight about this, and Huxley was like, oh, I will
bring it off. We are going to talk about some
of these debates after we hear from the sponsors that
keep stuff you missed in history class going. Huxley got
(20:46):
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 thirtieth, eighteen sixty. 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,
(21:07):
who is 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
(21:30):
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
(21:52):
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 Famesley 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
(22:15):
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
(22:35):
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 one million insect specimens. Huxley's story and
his writing also offer up an opportunity to sort of
set the record straight regarding humanity's place and the order
(22:57):
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 on the origin of
species did not ever make the leap to saying anything
(23:21):
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
(23:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
He would eventually write.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
About humankind's origins, but not for more than a decade
after the Origin of species. Yeah. 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
(24:17):
in nature, and in it he makes the case that
humans and grade age 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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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,
(25:23):
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
(25:43):
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 forward.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
In the late.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties, 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
(26:24):
all the way back in November of twenty sixteen, 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.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
So by the time.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
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 cocoliths, 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
(26:58):
the scientific community. But then in eighteen sixty eight 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
(27:21):
not been there before. Then he examined these lumps, and
he found that they contained cocoliths 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.
(27:42):
Quote the granule heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in
which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm. Take away
the cysts which characterized the radiolaria, and a dead spherozoum
would very nearly resemble one of the masses of this
deep sea ersk climb, which which must I think be
regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings
(28:05):
which have recently been so well described by Heckel in
his monography der Moneran. I propose to confer upon this
new owner the generic name of Bathhibius, and to call
it after the eminent professor of zoology in the University
of Jena, B.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Hakeli I.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
The scientist that he's talking about there, and for whom
he wanted to name this was Ernst Heckel, who was
very flattered by this situation. Bathhibius Heclei 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 place in the understanding of the origin
(28:44):
of life. Additional samples were collected and similar findings were
made with them until the expedition of the HMS Challenger,
which began in eighteen seventy two. 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 plane seawater
(29:06):
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. Who when Huxley was informed of
(29:30):
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 leak. Well,
every honest man has to do that now and then.
(29:52):
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 Bthhibius appears likely to
turn out to be a blunderubus. And he stated that
he intended to always set the record straight at every
(30:14):
opportunity if anyone was walking around with the misinformation that
he had promoted, and he did that he'd lived that
out the entirity of his life. While he was absolutely
willing to admit this error, what he would not do
was let other people use his gaff to try to
discredit science. George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyle, was
(30:35):
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. Thomas Huxley, who had
(30:57):
gained his vast knowledge through self directed study, believed very
deeply that education was for everyone, and he used his
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 eighteen fifties, he started a project
(31:21):
called the Workingman 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
(31:44):
made clear to any attendees that science was really just
a matter of observing things, questioning them, and examining evidence.
His advocacy for education for all was really for all
not just for men, but also for women. In eighteen seventy,
he was one of the founders of the London School
of Medicine for Women. This effort was in conjunction with
(32:06):
names that have appeared on our show before, including Sofia,
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
(32:28):
same information that was readily available in the cities. At
the age of sixty eight, 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
(32:48):
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 eighteen sixties. Throughout his life he often wrote about
(33:08):
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 eighteen eighty nine 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,
(33:30):
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,
(33:54):
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 waste of a capital you
uh and you know, said in eighteen ninety three. So
basically he went from the unknowable being a capitalized thing
as being you know, kind of a reference to some
(34:15):
sort of deity to be like, it doesn't even get
a capital letter for me anymore. The last dozen years
of Huxley's life included a series of challenges. His daughter
Marian started to have mental health issues. She's described as
having gone mad, although the specifics are not very clear.
This happened as Huxley was already stretched a bit thin
(34:37):
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 Marian's mental illness really seemed to have
kind of broken him. Yeah, he lived his life in
a constant online argument. Basically, everyone was always coming for
(34:58):
him because they knew he was the mouthpiece of evolution
and evolutionary science. He had been made President of the
Royal Society in eighteen eighty three, but he resigned that
post in eighteen eighty five as his family faced the
strain of what was going on with Marion. He also
stopped lecturing, and at that point the Prime Minister, in
recognition of Huxley's lifetime of work, gave him a state
(35:19):
pension of twelve hundred pounds a year. His health really
began to decline by the start of the eighteen nineties.
He had issues with his lungs in 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 small problem at the time. Thomas Huxley
died of heart failure on June twenty ninth, eighteen ninety five.
(35:40):
In nineteen oh seven, 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
(36:01):
lovely tribute to him.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
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
(36:26):
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 are genial humor, and many not the least for
(36:50):
their pure beauty of lucid English writing. I hope that
these selections may attract the attention of the working man
who's caused 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
(37:12):
glorious rays unite in the one, pure white light of
holy truth. 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.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Well, and he.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Thought he was so bad at it because the bees
never visited. But he was a terrific writer. Just in
case you were wondering, writer, Aldus 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 nineteen sixty three Nobel Prize in Physiology or
(37:47):
Medicine alongside Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Sir John Carew eccles
quote 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 Sorel Huxley, was UNESCO's first director and
(38:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
He's so quotable.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
I spent a lot of time just reading things he
wrote that really had no place in the podcast. Yeah,
you have some listener mail for us 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
(38:38):
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 too, though. I am writing because recently you shared
a reader's email about kids and historical clothing, so I
thought it would be fun to share a few of
our family holiday card pictures. Back in twenty seventeen, I
decided I was bored with doing whatever everyone else was
(39:01):
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
(39:23):
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 Ioaid's character from
The It Crowd, is adorable. Moss is adorable. These pictures
of her family are so stink and cute. The one
that I there were two that I really really love.
(39:43):
I mean, they're all great. One though, is like nineteen
fifties where 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 costs, which is also near and dear
to my heart. And then there's a third one where
(40:04):
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 print out 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
me neither, but I like that frog, and you love frogs.
I just think they're precious.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
They are.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
If you would like to write to us, you can
do that at History Podcast at.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
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 it, and it is all in
the show notes. You can look at that at mistinhistory
dot com. You can subscribe to the show on the
iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
(40:50):
Stuff you 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.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm prayse A V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson. This is an.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Episode that we are recording while we are on a
visit to the Bahamas. We are in the studio at
Baha Mar 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
(00:37):
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 gaff and
then acknowledging errors and learning from them. He also is
sort of famously known by his nickname Darwin's Bulldog for
(00:58):
his very vocal support part 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
(01:20):
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,
(01:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
There's no way not to just know that there is.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
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. Thomas Henry Huxley was born
(02:26):
May fourth, eighteen twenty five and ealing England today.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
That is part of London.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
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
(02:52):
lived past infancy, though Thomas was born in their home,
which was an apartment above a butcher's shop, and he
wrote a humorous story about his early childhood later in
his life, saying quote, I am not aware that any
portence preceded my arrival in this world, But in my
childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner
(03:13):
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
(03:35):
down the sash. 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 molefluous 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,
(04:00):
and I have been obliged to content myself through life
with saying what I mean 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, and I know that was
a long story to read, but I wanted to include
(04:21):
it because it really sets you up for what they're
going to get from Thomas Huxley. He's a little of
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
(04:44):
know why getting stung by bees would have made him
more eloquent, but I think it was 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
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 eight,
(05:08):
but the school closed in eighteen thirty seven 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
ten 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,
(05:32):
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 Guerta. Although his father had
been a teacher, it was Rachel, his mother, who he
really credited with giving him the gift of natural intelligence.
(05:55):
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.
(06:16):
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 Zelle Huxley
(06:39):
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
nineteenth 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
(07:00):
examined its place in the human social structure and viewed
it from a progressively more scientific lens. When he was thirteen,
Huxley was apprenticed to John Charles Cook, a doctor who
was also his sister Ellen's husband. Encyclopedia Britannica described Cook
as a medical materialist, meaning someone who believes that all maladies,
(07:22):
including psychological ones, traced 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
(07:43):
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. Yeah,
it's said that he was really very struck by the
horrible soircumstances that London's poor were living in, and that
(08:03):
part of his apprenticeship really impacted the way he thought
about education for the rest of his life and what.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
He could do to help people.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Huxley described once going to an autopsy with his friends
as a boy drawn near 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
(08:34):
skin or his blood stream. 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
(08:57):
century of co tendancy of my flesh Lee Tabernacle. At
the age of seventeen, 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.
(09:17):
He won a gold medal for his achievement in anatomy
and physiology from the school. Just after Huxley's graduation from
London University in eighteen forty five, 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
(09:40):
strength by connecting keratin filaments, and that is now known
as Huxley's Layer. We will talk about Huxley's next somewhat
surprising career move after we pause for a sponsor break.
(10:02):
In eighteen forty six, 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 friends suggested that he write to
(10:22):
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
(10:46):
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 he 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
(11:07):
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
soul 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
(11:29):
bottom and I along with it. 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 eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
That paper was titled on.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
The Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of the Medusa,
but he never heard anything back from the Society. Upon
his return to London in eighteen fifty he was very
surprised to learn that his paper had been received, published
and lauded by the scientific community. Huxley also came home
an engaged man. While he was on that journey, he
(12:13):
met a young woman while the ship was docked in Sydney, Australia.
Her name was Henrietta Ann Heathorne. 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 Sydney until the time came that they could be together.
In eighteen fifty one, because of his paper on anemones
(12:36):
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.
Huxley had a couple of factors leading him away from
(12:56):
his military career in the early eighteen fifties. 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.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That was not out of the blue.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
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
(13:38):
had been born into 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
(14:01):
he could send for Henrietta and bring her to London
so that they could start.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
A life together.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
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
(14:29):
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 thirty
one years, and a large part of my work has
been paleontological. Neither of Huxley's new positions was especially high paying,
(14:54):
but the two combined meant that he could finally send
for Henrietta, and they got married in eighteen fifty five. Yeah,
they were, by all accounts, very very happy together. In
his thirties, 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
(15:15):
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 nineteenth century England.
(15:40):
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. In eighteen oh nine, French naturalist Jean
Baptiste Lamarque had published a book titled Philosophy Zoologice. That
book built on work that Lamarck had been doing for years,
(16:02):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:46):
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, and writing several decades later
about it, thought that Lamark had some really interesting ideas,
but that he was not correct in his assessment, and
(17:09):
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. In
(17:29):
eighteen forty four, 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 forty years later. He had
withheld his name because he knew it would be controversial
(17:51):
and he didn't want the potential fearer to destroy his livelihood.
He was really correct to be worried about this. This
was not a case where he was scientists who had
discovered something so new 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
(18:14):
to the point where humans appeared.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
And the work repeated a lot.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Of things that the scientific community had already dismissed as
incorrect and in some cases even silly.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Yeah, it was like he did no vetting.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
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 it.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
No, nope.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Uh. 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 grudged no man
either the glory or the prophet to be obtained from Charlotteanery.
And we can hardly expect that those who are so
ignorant of science as to be misled by the vestiges
(18:56):
will read what we have to say upon the subject.
But a book 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
(19:20):
upon to undertake this criticism at present, since, as we
shall see, the vestigiarian has bolstered up his case by
the use of names and authorities which were justifiable might
give a certain value to his statements. But then, in
eighteen fifty nine, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species,
which changed science forever, and it became a pivotal work
(19:43):
in Huxley's life and career. Unlike the Lamarck and Chambers
writing on evolution, Darwin's work captured Huxley's attention, 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.
Andy felt that the reasoning and science of natural selection
(20:06):
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 towing up with the detractors.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
But Darwin was not Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
It was like Darwin was like, I don't want to
fight about this, and Huxley was like, oh, I will
bring it off. We are going to talk about some
of these debates after we hear from the sponsors that
keep stuff you missed in history class going. Huxley got
(20:46):
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 thirtieth, eighteen sixty. 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,
(21:07):
who is 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
(21:30):
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
(21:52):
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 Famesley 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
(22:15):
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
(22:35):
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 one million insect specimens. Huxley's story and
his writing also offer up an opportunity to sort of
set the record straight regarding humanity's place and the order
(22:57):
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 on the origin of
species did not ever make the leap to saying anything
(23:21):
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
(23:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
He would eventually write.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
About humankind's origins, but not for more than a decade
after the Origin of species. Yeah. 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
(24:17):
in nature, and in it he makes the case that
humans and grade age 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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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,
(25:23):
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
(25:43):
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 forward.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
In the late.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties, 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
(26:24):
all the way back in November of twenty sixteen, 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.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
So by the time.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
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 cocoliths, 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
(26:58):
the scientific community. But then in eighteen sixty eight 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
(27:21):
not been there before. Then he examined these lumps, and
he found that they contained cocoliths 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.
(27:42):
Quote the granule heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in
which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm. Take away
the cysts which characterized the radiolaria, and a dead spherozoum
would very nearly resemble one of the masses of this
deep sea ersk climb, which which must I think be
regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings
(28:05):
which have recently been so well described by Heckel in
his monography der Moneran. I propose to confer upon this
new owner the generic name of Bathhibius, and to call
it after the eminent professor of zoology in the University
of Jena, B.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Hakeli I.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
The scientist that he's talking about there, and for whom
he wanted to name this was Ernst Heckel, who was
very flattered by this situation. Bathhibius Heclei 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 place in the understanding of the origin
(28:44):
of life. Additional samples were collected and similar findings were
made with them until the expedition of the HMS Challenger,
which began in eighteen seventy two. 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 plane seawater
(29:06):
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. Who when Huxley was informed of
(29:30):
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 leak. Well,
every honest man has to do that now and then.
(29:52):
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 Bthhibius appears likely to
turn out to be a blunderubus. And he stated that
he intended to always set the record straight at every
(30:14):
opportunity if anyone was walking around with the misinformation that
he had promoted, and he did that he'd lived that
out the entirity of his life. While he was absolutely
willing to admit this error, what he would not do
was let other people use his gaff to try to
discredit science. George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyle, was
(30:35):
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. Thomas Huxley, who had
(30:57):
gained his vast knowledge through self directed study, believed very
deeply that education was for everyone, and he used his
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 eighteen fifties, he started a project
(31:21):
called the Workingman 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
(31:44):
made clear to any attendees that science was really just
a matter of observing things, questioning them, and examining evidence.
His advocacy for education for all was really for all
not just for men, but also for women. In eighteen seventy,
he was one of the founders of the London School
of Medicine for Women. This effort was in conjunction with
(32:06):
names that have appeared on our show before, including Sofia,
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
(32:28):
same information that was readily available in the cities. At
the age of sixty eight, 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
(32:48):
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 eighteen sixties. Throughout his life he often wrote about
(33:08):
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 eighteen eighty nine 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,
(33:30):
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,
(33:54):
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 waste of a capital you
uh and you know, said in eighteen ninety three. So
basically he went from the unknowable being a capitalized thing
as being you know, kind of a reference to some
(34:15):
sort of deity to be like, it doesn't even get
a capital letter for me anymore. The last dozen years
of Huxley's life included a series of challenges. His daughter
Marian started to have mental health issues. She's described as
having gone mad, although the specifics are not very clear.
This happened as Huxley was already stretched a bit thin
(34:37):
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 Marian's mental illness really seemed to have
kind of broken him. Yeah, he lived his life in
a constant online argument. Basically, everyone was always coming for
(34:58):
him because they knew he was the mouthpiece of evolution
and evolutionary science. He had been made President of the
Royal Society in eighteen eighty three, but he resigned that
post in eighteen eighty five as his family faced the
strain of what was going on with Marion. He also
stopped lecturing, and at that point the Prime Minister, in
recognition of Huxley's lifetime of work, gave him a state
(35:19):
pension of twelve hundred pounds a year. His health really
began to decline by the start of the eighteen nineties.
He had issues with his lungs in 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 small problem at the time. Thomas Huxley
died of heart failure on June twenty ninth, eighteen ninety five.
(35:40):
In nineteen oh seven, 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
(36:01):
lovely tribute to him.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
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
(36:26):
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 are genial humor, and many not the least for
(36:50):
their pure beauty of lucid English writing. I hope that
these selections may attract the attention of the working man
who's caused 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
(37:12):
glorious rays unite in the one, pure white light of
holy truth. 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.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Well, and he.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Thought he was so bad at it because the bees
never visited. But he was a terrific writer. Just in
case you were wondering, writer, Aldus 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 nineteen sixty three Nobel Prize in Physiology or
(37:47):
Medicine alongside Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Sir John Carew eccles
quote 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 Sorel Huxley, was UNESCO's first director and
(38:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
He's so quotable.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
I spent a lot of time just reading things he
wrote that really had no place in the podcast. Yeah,
you have some listener mail for us 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
(38:38):
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 too, though. I am writing because recently you shared
a reader's email about kids and historical clothing, so I
thought it would be fun to share a few of
our family holiday card pictures. Back in twenty seventeen, I
decided I was bored with doing whatever everyone else was
(39:01):
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
(39:23):
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 Ioaid's character from
The It Crowd, is adorable. Moss is adorable. These pictures
of her family are so stink and cute. The one
that I there were two that I really really love.
(39:43):
I mean, they're all great. One though, is like nineteen
fifties where 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 costs, which is also near and dear
to my heart. And then there's a third one where
(40:04):
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 print out 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
me neither, but I like that frog, and you love frogs.
I just think they're precious.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
They are.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
If you would like to write to us, you can
do that at History Podcast at.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
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 it, and it is all in
the show notes. You can look at that at mistinhistory
dot com. You can subscribe to the show on the
iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
(40:50):
Stuff you 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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