Table of Contents

The Devils Disciple; 18251846: Dreaming My Own Dreams; 18461850: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; 18501858: Lost in the Wilderness; 18581865: The New Luther; 1865-1870: The Scientific Swell; Evolutions High Priest; 18701884: Marketing the New Nature; 18851895: The Old Lion.

Reviews

Desmond (coauthor with James Moore of Darwin) has produced a dramatic if densely detailed and sometimes self-consciously literary life of Thomas Huxley, the contentious missionary of evolution, known in his day as Darwin's bulldog‘"one of the founders of the sceptical, scientific twentieth century." Huxley's beginnings as a physician and marine biologist emerge vividly, as does the ferment of ideas that turned him into an impassioned religious radical yet systematic professional. The functional architecture of nature, developing through trial and error, was not, he argued, God's handwriting. To move minds, however, he needed to manage his way into positions of intellectual authority that paid only butler's wages. Yet his evolutionary evangelism contradicted biblical dogma and threatened to keep him on the edge of penury. The gentlemanly, reclusive Darwin let the feisty but lower-class Huxley battle what he derided as "Theology and Parsondom," which both saw as the "irreconcilable enemies of Science." In the year of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Huxley vowed that if he lived for 30 more years, he would "see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies." Born in 1825, he died in 1895, but, one of the celebrities of his time, he had long been burned out. Not, though, the reader of this challenging, stimulating work. Illustrations. (Nov.)

In Victorian England, T.H. Huxley was more notorious than Darwin. He was a self-educated, pugnacious defender of the doctrine of evolution, preaching Darwin's findings to bishops and cloth-capped manual workers while winning converts of every class‘loved and loathed by people he'd never met. He studied jellyfish, marine worms, primates, dinosaurs, and humans; coined the word "agnostic"; and was the first to be designated a "scientist." Desmond (Darwin, LJ 5/15/92), himself a scientist and writer on evolution, has produced an exhaustive biography, dense and detailed, with touches that bring Huxley alive. There are extensive quotes from Huxley's writings incorporated so seamlessly that it seems you are hearing Huxley speak. A definitive biography of an important figure, this book is highly recommended for academic libraries and any collection on the history of science, evolution, or the Victorian era.‘Jean E.S. Storrs, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore