Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley was a ship’s surgeon who taught himself biology on a four-year voyage to Australia, became the leading anatomist of his day, and made himself Darwin’s bulldog, defending natural selection against Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860 and coining agnostic for his own position. Science and Culture, an address of 1880 at the opening of a science college in Birmingham, argued that a scientific education is as liberal as a classical one, and Matthew Arnold answered it. He sat on ten royal commissions, fought for public schools, and was the grandfather of Aldous and Julian.