Thomas Henry Huxley

THE NATURALIST AS INTERPRETER AND SEER.

Professor Huxley, as a naturalist, educator, and controversialist, was one of the commanding figures of the 19th century.

To physiology and morphology, his researches added much of importance.

As an expositor, he stood unapproached.

As the bold and witty champion of Darwinism, he gave natural selection and acceptance much more early and wide than it would otherwise have enjoyed.

In 1876, he delivered in America three lectures on evolution.

the third of the series is here given all three are copyrighted and published by d appleton and co new york in a volume which also contains a lecture on the study of biology since eighteen seventy six the arguments of professor huxley have been reinforced by the discovery of many fossils connecting not only the horse but other quadrupeds with species widely different and now extinct the most comprehensive collection illustrating the descent of the horse is to be seen at the american museum of natural history new york where also the evolution of tapirs camels llamas rhinoceroses dinosaurs great ground sloths and other animals are clearly to be traced in most cases by remains discovered in america A capital book on the theme Broach by Professor Huxley is Animals of the Past by Frederick A. Lucas, curator of the Division of Comparative Anatomy, United States National Museum, Washington, D.C., published by McClure, Phillips & Co., New York.

The Life and Letters of Professor Huxley, edited by his son Leonard Huxley, is a work of rare interest.

He believed in only that which science could, in some way, bring up.

And his own grand ancestor, Thomas Huxley, when Thomas Huxley one day was asked, in the presence of another scientist, if you saw a great big object rise from here and float through space unsupported by any known power of the man, what would you say that you've just seen? And the other scientist answered first.

And he said, well, I would say I've just witnessed the suspension of the laws of gravity.

Well, Thomas Huxley being more, I would say, profound in his thinking than the other scientist, he said, I wouldn't say that.

There may be a law that, where it is operated, gravity, as we understand it, doesn't function.

While the other one couldn't conceive of any law coming into being that could put at naught what we consider gravity to be.

Yet he didn't take that page from his ancestors' book, because he really believed it had no meaning, none whatsoever.

And so lived like Polly, of all the excitement that you could, if the body and time allowed it.

He took the poems apart, analyzed meaning, style, technique, which is worth a pause here because Oxford is where this series began.

It's the city where in 1860 the Bishop Samuel Wilberforce debated Thomas Huxley, the famous atheist and defender of evolutionary theory.

And in a much publicized rhetorical flourish, Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley which side of his family the monkey was on.

And the war between science and religion was supposedly off and running.

Of course you don't have a step ladder for you, but real quick, let me give you a, another ladder quote that was just messaged to me by user.

As I just mentioned that people were asking me a famous, this is from the great Thomas Huxley who says the rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon.

but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other one somewhat higher.

That means we climb it all the way to the top.

It was clearly an imperial policy.

It was supplemented by the particular movement in the mid 19th century in Britain associated with Thomas Huxley, which anticipated HG Wells and the New World Order.

And we see this clash in particular in the X Club, where they set up a society to basically act as an entryist organization, a political organization for scientists to model the discourse.

And we see people realizing that there was a problem with this and therefore how it writes his book on the history of the supernatural, because he understood that this endeavor that they were engaging in, following on from again people like san simone and france and before that emmanuel kant emmanuel kant had a huge influence on the reduction of of the legitimate world view on what was what we could prove following on from descartes etc so the culmination of those views in an imperial scientific way was to say we'll present an alternative model now they knew that they were abolishing the soul and the spirit because We can see that the ideas of the soul and spirit go back.

This is something that goes all the way back to the 1860s, and it was right when Darwin published The Origin of Species.

It was right then, literally within the year, that the idea that birds were part of the reptile group that evolved from reptiles and not only... reptiles but specifically dinosaurs it was in 1860 1861 that this idea was coming together scientifically being presented in scientific journals but also in public lectures mostly by thomas henry huxley the great victorian titan of science he would go and he would give lectures across london He was one of the first true pop science psychomers of the day.

There were no podcasts back then.

There were no blogs.