charles_darwin

Biographies
declined rapidly after his death. It was superseded by men such as
Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Louis Agassiz. Fortunately, Humboldt’s
name is not forgotten. Counties in California, Iowa, and Nevada bear
his name. The same is true of the Monumento Nacional Alejandro
de Humboldt, a national monument in Venezuela. Humboldt was
one of the greatest promoters of scientific research in the nineteenth
century: it is appropriate that such a polymath has an area of the
Moon, Mare Humboldtianum, named after him.
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Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825–29 June 1895)
Thomas Henry Huxley was the most vocal defender of Darwin’s
theory of evolution in the British scientific community in the last half
of the nineteenth century. Darwin asked Huxley to be his agent, his
spokesman, in public disputes about The Origin of Species. Huxley performed
this task so well that he is known as ‘‘Darwin’s bulldog.’’
Huxley was one of the first scientists to support Darwin’s theory
openly. (Darwin had sent Huxley one of the prepublication copies.)
In the last chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin expressed the
hope that younger naturalists would be more receptive of his theory:
Huxley was one of these naturalists. He wrote positive reviews of
The Origin of Species in The Times (London) in 1859 and in the Westminster
Review in 1860. He defended the theory of evolution when
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce attacked it at a meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860. He wrote Evidence
as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), which argued that human
evolution was a part of the evolution of all organisms. He coined the
term ‘‘Darwinism:’’ a word signifying Darwin’s explanation of the origin
of species. He was a founder of the X Club (in 1864), a group of
men dedicated to the defense of scientific inquiry such as Darwin’s.
He gave numerous lectures explaining and defending Darwinism in
Britain and the United States in the 1860s and 1870s.
Huxley was not solely a defender of Darwin. He also was a preeminent
British zoologist, anatomist, paleontologist, and scientific educator.
His family was not wealthy and it was not part of the British
establishment like Darwin’s—his father was a mathematics teacher at
a small school in Ealing, West London. Huxley’s humble background
explains why he valued the democratizing effect of education.
Throughout his career, Huxley opposed the control of knowledge by
elites, whether in the Church of England or the moneyed classes. He
promoted science and education for everyone, particularly the working
class and even including women. The books Lessons in Elementary