Desmond. THOMAS HUXLEY

Desmond, Adrian. HUXLEY: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest. Addison Wesley 1997. 820pp. ISBN 0-201-95987-9. $37.50. (4.5 cents per page)

Egon Friedell tells us that from the 1890s to 1910, his dog had evolved from a canis impressionisticus to a canis expressionisticus. The life of Thomas Huxley reads like the continuation of a novel by Dickens with a good deal of Stevenson thrown in. Bright, good looking boy - a fair-haired lad - works himself out of the muck of the suburban shabby genteel world of Dissenting England in the 1830s, gets a job on a ship, travels for five years to the foreign world of Argentina and the newly opened continent of Australia, and to New Guinea, has all kinds of adventures in the jungle, reads a lot, teaches himself Italian (from The Divine Comedy), keeps careful notes of his passion for jelly-fish and molluscs, travels in the Australian outback, goes to dances in a Jane Austen world transplanted to Sydney, meets a girl and falls in love.
At the end of his five year service aboard, he returns home to earn his living with his jellyfish and molluscs ("an upright young man, in a society without safety nets. The mores of the parish magazine were his: no marriage without means"). After another five years, he succeeds just enough to be able to convince the girl into joining her fine dancing horseman. (She didn't need much convincing, having set her cap at him). They marry, and have children (from whom evolve the later Huxleys: Aldous and Elspeth and Julian, et hoc genus omne); all the while he is busy undermining the world of the amateur hobbyists who dominated (and corrupted) the biological sciences. He succeeds in replacing the amateurs by trained students. From these have come such great successes as the English have added to the evolving study of biology. (He succeeded too well as the trained scientists have evolved into the same kind of amateur theologians. But he was not to know that).
This is a fine book, almost despite itself. Which is the best kind of book. (The subtitle is meaningless). It is a love story. By prolific quotation from Huxley's letters and journals, and those of his wife, the author writes, almost accidentally, the biography of an active, honorable, generous man, who never lost his young man's fury at the injustice he had seen in the London slums and aboard ship; and who never lost his boyish delight in knocking hats off pompous heads.

Fortunately for Huxley, he had not been subjected to the brain-washing of the Public Schools which gives that querulous, frightened tone to so many of the intellectuals of his (and our) day. (The wealthy Darwin was forever checking his stock portfolio). Nor, despite the title, was Huxley sucked into the inanity of Evolution By Natural Selection; he recognized it as a substitute (a superstition) for "God [lege Mother Nature] put you where you are"; and despised it. He maintained simply "I do not know". ("Atheism is, logically speaking, as absurd as polytheism"). He went back to his studies of jellyfish and molluscs, of the diseases which kept ruining the fishermen, and his organizing of training institutes to give bright, enthusiastic young men a chance to develope their talents. Were he alive, he would undoubtedly be lashing out at the academic heirarchy which has replaced the ecclesiastical.
The author of this biography sprinkles the biography with a few flecks of the ignorance of the educated Englishman. Thus, St. Pius IX: "a good, inept, undiplomatic soul". (Von Bismarck's system has collapsed and the Parliament is in no great shape; the Vatican is still going strong. Inept?). Thus: "London's gigantic sewage system was set to flush out the medieval ages". (My fourth grade history book says that much of the city had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. Medieval or Malthusian?). For those interested in the study of institutions, this book does an excellent analysis of the evolution of the older clerical academy into the scientifical academy, both blindly selected by Mother Nature's Parliament, red in tooth and claw, ever prompt to indulge in bashing the heads of foxes, Boers, Indians, and Irishmen. And then wondering why nobody loves it.
Cervantes complained that Don Quixote had taken over his novel; Mr. Desmond, in the tradition of Boswell, allows his subject to take over this biography. Like the queen who gave her name to the epoch, our Victorian ancestors, pace the freudlich imaginations of our professoriat, were not ignorant, nor inactive in matters sexual (teste the size of their families). Where would we be without the ancestors? We could use another Huxley, inflamed by the amateur perversion of his work, and by its use to denigrate the poor in order to maintain the corporately comfortable and their saponaceous courtiers in the dating services called universities, research institutes, and government halls. Huxley well knew that babies are not brought by storks from gene pools. Darwin and Spencer and H.G. Wells and their neo-Darwinian successors are dour and despairing, ever counting their royalties. Huxley was never rich enough to be dour and despairing.
As a young man out in the jungle, or aboard ship, Huxley occasionally got drunk. There's nothing like the evolutionary experience of a hangover to clear the head of fantasies. We select the drink; Mother Nature blindly teaches us about the chemical process whereby the water in the body is fixed (dissolved) by the alcohol. Huxley is fun. Even with the excellent index, he is forever outrunning his biographer. But Mr. Desmond keeps up with him, enjoying himself and sharing that enjoyment with us. Highly recommended for all ages.