Word: huxley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...biggest frogman in the metaphysical puddle was a great, eloquent, side-whiskered, doggedly handsome jumping jack of all intellectual trades called Thomas Henry Huxley. For a while, belief seemed to be a question of Genesis or The Origin of Species, Adam or ape, God or Darwin-and Evolutionary Biologist Huxley, as "Darwin's bulldog," was widely suspected of not being pro-God. For the line Huxley himself preferred to tread, a sort of high wire stretched between scientific fact and an unknowable God. he coined the word agnostic...
Scientific Humanist. Something of T. H. Huxley's prodigious reputation-Darwin himself confessed that his own intelligence was "infantile" beside Huxley's-comes through in Biographer Cyril Bibby's book. He is abetted in forewords by Huxley's two greatly talented grandsons : Sir Julian and Aldous Huxley. Ironically. Scientist Julian praises grandfather's prose, while Stylist Aldous praises his pedagogics. Without much help from pedestrian Author Bibby, who bears down too heavily on Huxley's role as an educational reformer, the book crackles with examples of Huxley's wit as his other careers...
...highly improbable combination of genes," in Grandson Julian's phrase, is needed to explain Huxley's many-faceted genius. His father, who died mad, was a poor schoolmaster at Great Ealing (a school attended by Thackeray, Cardinal Newman and W. S. Gilbert); Tom was a pupil there briefly, and hated it. As a "plebeian,"' which is what he proudly called himself, young Huxley could not hope for a university education in 19th century England, but a scholarship and a medical brother-in-law saved him from the obscurity of the uneducated. He graduated in medicine from London...
Soapy Sam Was a Cad. Most educated Englishmen were scientific illiterates, but Huxley greatly helped change that situation. He had speculated about evolution some years before Origin of Species was published, and in the five years after it exploded on the world (in 1859), Huxley exploded with it by issuing 46 major publications on subjects ranging from the fishes of the Devonian epoch to the New Labyrinthodonts from the Edinburgh coalfield. With a "basilisk artistry" on the lecture platform and "a certain ruthlessness," Huxley loved to bandy texts and split hairs with the theologians. He signed letters in mock church...
...Huxley, the issues of science and religion were not nearly so clear as they are taken to be by some of his latter-day admirers, and his own high wire between faith and honest doubt sometimes trembled under him. He became bad-tempered every time his devoted Australian wife took another of his brood off to be baptized, but toward the end of his life took great stock in the Old Testament. He was no scientific bigot and mocked his materialist friend John Tyndall by asking how he could deduce Hamlet from the molecular structure of a mutton chop...