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Huxley's defence of Darwin
Michael Bartholomew
a
a
Sub-Department of the History of Medicine, University College
London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, England
Version of record first published: 18 Sep 2006.
To cite this article: Michael Bartholomew (1975): Huxley's defence of Darwin, Annals of Science,
32:6, 525-535
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ANNALS OF SCIENCE, 32 (1975), 525-535
Huxley's Defence of Darwin
MICHAELBARTHOLOMEW
Sub-Department of the History of Medicine,
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, England
Received 14 August 1975
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Summary
This article ventures a reappraisal of Huxley's role in the Darwinian
debates. First, the views on life-history held by Huxley before 1859 are
identified. Next, the disharmony between these views and the view put
forward by Darwin in the Origin of species 0859) is discussed. Huxley's
defence of the Origin is then reviewed in an effort to show that, despite
his fervour on Darwin's behalf, his advocacy of the case for natural
selection was not particularly compelling, and that his own scientific
work took no revolutionary new direction after 1859.
1. Huxley's views before 1859
According to Huxley's own account of the part he played in the Darwinian
debates--an account that has not subsequently been substantially challenged-he had, until 1858, adopted an attitude of ' th/itige skepsis' (active doubt)
on the question of the species mutability2 This may be strictly true, but
during these early years he had adopted a number of rather intransigent
commitments concerning the interpretation of the history of life, commitments
which by no means implicitly favoured the interpretation t h a t Darwin and
Wallace were to advance. Rather, Huxley's early views contained elements
t h a t now seem positively anti-Darwinian. An examination of two of Huxley's
early publications will serve to illustrate and clarify these early commitments.
The first publication is his translation, in 1853, of Von Beer's work on
embryology. Although this is a translation and not an original work, we
can be fairly sure t h a t Huxley both endorsed Beer's views and wanted them
to be widely disseminated, for in his introduction he calls Baer's work ' t h e
deepest and soundest philosophy of zoology, and indeed of biology generally,
which has yet been given to the world ,.2 Baer's aim was to refute all notions
of serial development. He contended t h a t animal forms must be classified
only as more or less complex variations on four constant and discrete themes:
species cannot be interpreted as stages o n a supposed universal progression of
life, no matter whether the progression is based on the sequence of forms in the
1 T. H. Huxley, ' OR the reception of the Origin of species ', in F. Darwin (ed.), The llfe and
letters of Charles Darwin (3 vols., 1888, London), vol. 2, 179-204; an4 ' The coming of ago of
" The origin of species " ' (1880), repr. in Darwiniana (Collected essays, vol. 2 (1893, London)),
227-243. Two recent, rather uncritical, studies are A. Ashforth, Thomas Henry Huxley(1969,
New York); and C. ]3ibby, Scientist extraordinary--T. H. Huxley (1972, Oxford).
2 T. H. Huxley, ' F r a g m e n t s relating to philosophical zoology (translation of parts of
K. E. yon Beer, Beitrdge zur Kenntniss der niedern Thiere, and Ueber Entwickelungs-Geschichte
der Thiere) ', in Scientific memoirs selected from the transactions of foreign academics of salera~,
vol. 1 (1853), 176-238 (p. 176).
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fossil record, on the relations between existing species, or on an allegedly
universal pattern of embryological development. He acknowledged that
there are a few correspondences between the embryonic conditions of certain
animals and the adult condition of others, b u t maintained that these correspondences are ' of no particular importance ,.a
By publishing Baer, Huxley set his own face against attempts to offer
evolutionary accounts of the history of life which depended on crude analogies
drawn between ontogeny and the sequence of forms in the fossil record. (The
interesting effect of this commitment on Darwin has been traced by Jane
Oppenheimer. 4) Just as important as his endorsement of Baer's conclusions,
however, is Huxley's implied approval of his style of doing science. Huxley
abhorred the intrusion of any sort of metaphysical dimension into science,
whether it came in the form of old-fashioned miracles, or in the subtler form
of Owen's or Agassiz's transcendentalism. By today's standards, his
abhorrence was of course simple-minded, and even on his own terms he was
not consistent, for he was given occasionally to making the hazy, grandiose
sorts of statements about Nature that he found so objectionable in his
opponents: he concluded an early lecture, for example, by declaring that
' living nature is not a mechanism but a poem '.5 Similarly, he seems to have
approved of Spencer's grand and woolly system of cosmic evolution, although
he did discreetly express a disagreement with Spencer's 'Unknowable ' - a disagreement which he kept to himself until 1889, lest it should provoke
' a breach with an old friend ,.6 Nonetheless, it is plain that b y the mid 1850s
he had a pretty clear impression of what good science ought to look like: science
should not be garbed with religion, and equally, it should invoke no mysterious,
unexaminable upward urges in nature. Hence Lamarck, Owen and Agassiz all
represented, in Huxley's opinion, bad science, while Baer, Lyell and, later,
Darwin, represented good science. In other words, Huxley's fundamental
commitment was not primarily to particular theories, but to the principle of
scientific naturalism. Consequently, he tended to undervalue work that
proceeded from any other set of assumptions.
Huxley applied his distinction between good and bad science with a
vengeance in 1854, when he reviewed the tenth edition of Chambers's Vestiges
of the natural history of creation/ However, in order to explain fully the
extraordinary savagery of Huxley's review, we have to introduce personal
motives. When he wrote his review, Huxley was at a very low ebb. He had
no job and no money. He had fallen out with the Admiralty over the
publication of the work he had carried out during the voyage of the Rattlesnake,
and he felt that he was never going to be financially secure enough to marry the
fiancee whom he had left behind in Australia. He was ambitious and
frustrated. Consequently, when he was invited to review the tenth edition of a
8 Ibid., 191.
ft. Oppenheimer, 'An embryological enigma in the Origin of species ', in B. Glass et al.,
Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859 (1959, Baltimore), 292-322.
s T. H. Huxley, ' On natural history, as knowledge, discipline, and power ' (Royal Institution
lecture, 1856), repr. in M. Foster and E. Lankester (eds.), The scientific memoirs of Thon~as Henry
Huxley (4 vols., 1898-1902, London), vol. 1, 305-314 (p. 311).
e Huxley to Gould, 1889, repr. in E. Clodd, Thomas Henry Huxley (1902, London), 220-221.
[T. I-I. Huxley], ' Vestiges of the natural history of creation. Tenth edition, London, 1853 ',
British and foreign medioo.chirurgical review, 18 (1854), 425-439.
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Huxley's Defence of Darwin
527
notorious and successful book written b y an anonymous amateur, he lashed out,
calling the author an 'unfortunate scientific parvenu' who, with 'whining
assertions of sincerity ', had produced a ' m a s s of pretentious nonsense ,.s
Years later, when Huxley had himself won fame and security, he publicly
expressed his regret at having been so savage in his attack; 9 but although his
remorse was no doubt sincere, he may also have felt uneasy, for on several of the
points at which he had attacked Chambers, Chambers had simply been in the
right while he had been in the wrong. He never came to view Chambers's
approach to science as anything less than reprehensible, but perhaps he came
to acknowledge that some of Chambers's answers had not been as wide of the
mark as his own had been.
Chambers's strongest point was his interpretation of the fossil record.
His interpretation was erratic, but he was able to take the progressive temporal
sequence of organic forms that had been proclaimed during the 1830s by every
major palaeontologist save Lyell, and, reasonably enough, turn it into an
account of transmutation. Huxley at this time, however, on his own
confession, ' did not care for fossils '; a few months after writing his review
of Vestiges, when offered Forbes's post of palaeontologist and lecturer in
natural history at the Geological Survey, he refused the palaeontologist
part outright, and accepted the natural history part only on the condition
that he could discard it when a post in physiology came among.l~ So he was
not in an especially good position to pass judgement on Chambers's interpretation of the fossil record. However, Chambers played into his hands by
choosing to overlay his straightforward interpretation of the fossil record
with confusing notions concerning embryology and spontaneous generation.
And since he leaned for support on Agassiz, and to some extent on Owen
(although of course these figures would have regarded Chambers's use of their
work as illegitimate), he handed Huxley another stick to be beaten with; for
the transcendentalism and idealism of Agassiz and 0wen were, for Huxley,
anathemas.
2. The influence of Lyell
In his critique of Chambers's interpretation of the fossil record, Huxley's
allegiance to Lyell becomes clear. In Principles of geology (1830-33), Lyell
had strenuously argued that there is no pattern of increasing complexity and
differentiation running through the fossil record: the most complex mammals
must be assumed to have existed son~ewhere on earth at the earliest periods.
Lyell's account of life-history ruled out the possibility of divergence and the
descent of the more complex from the less. 11 As I have argued elsewhere,
Lyell's doctrine---' non-progressionism '--proceeded at a deep level from an
essentially conservative, religious set of beliefs about man and nature; 12
but as presented in Principles, the doctrine looked to Huxley like a thoroughly
up-to-date piece of scientific naturalism--especially as Lyell backed it up with
Ibid., 439, 426, 425.
0 F. D a r w i n , Life and letters ( f o o t n o t e 1), vol. 2, 188-189.
10 T. H. H u x l e y , ' A u t o b i o g r a p h y ' , in Method and results (Collected essays, vol. 1 (1893,
London)), 1-17 (p. 15).
11 C. Lyell, Principles of geology (3 vols., 1830-33, L o n d o n ) , vol. 1, eh. 9.
12 M. B a r t h o l o m e w , ' L y e l l a n d e v o l u t i o n : a n a c c o u n t of L y e l l ' s r e s p o n s e t o t h e prospect o f a n
e v o l u t i o n a r y a n c e s t r y for m a n ', British journal for the history of science, 6 (1973), 261-303.
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Michael Bartholomew
a stern critique of Lamarck's notion of an upward organic progress resulting
from the activity of an ' internal sentiment ' in animals, la In his review of
Vestiges, Huxley cites Lyell's arguments as formidable obstacles for Chambers
to have to overcome. Chambers's point, made against the whole thrust of
Lyell's arguments, was that the earliest representatives of each class of plants
and animals are simpler than the more modern representatives, and also t h a t
class has followed class in ascending order of complexity. Lyell had said t h a t
all conclusions about progression are false, for we cannot know what the forms
t h a t m a y well have lived at the time of the deposition of the very earliest rocks
looked like; and in any case, the earliest recovered fossils are often no less
complex than the modern representatives of the classes to which they belong.
Huxley completely accepted Lyell's point, and in his review he tried to
show t h a t it is reasonable to assume that the fossil fishes which Chambers
advanced as evidence of the simplicity of early fish, are in fact 'more highly
organised ' than modern fish. He concluded: ' I t may readily be comprehended
what validity there is in the whole argument of the " Vestiges ", as regards
the successive development of life upon our planet, when its foundation appears
to be thus baseless and rotten ,.14
Broadly speaking, however, Chambers was quite right. His argument was
obscured--and the whole debate continued to be obscured for years a f t e r - - b y a
fog of undefined terms like ' higher ', ' lower ', ' embryonic ', ' noble ',
'degraded , and so on; but the important point is that Huxley, following
Lyell, h a d combatted a basically fair, though injudicious, attempt to interpret
the fossil record genealogically, and it took him many years--until well
beyond the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Orig~n of species--to establish a
framework within which he could himself systematically seek genealogical
connections. Indeed, it may well be t h a t during the 1850s one of Huxley's
motives in producing his monographs and lectures was to further confound
the notions advanced in Vestiges. In 1855, for example, in a Royal Institution
lecture, he repeated the arguments he had deployed against Vestiges, setting
them in a wider context. His address was a critique of what he called ' t h e
hypothesis of the progressive development of animal life in time ', and it went
farther than Darwin liked, in denying both fossil progression and the validity
of the embryological analogy as supports for evolution. Darwin wrote to him:
' Thank you for your abstract of your lecture at the Royal Institution, which
interested me much, and rather grieved me, for I had hoped things had been in a
slight degree otherwise ,.15 Cautious as Darwin was about asserting that the
history of life has been progressive, he evidently did not care for the extreme
form of Huxley's denial of progression. Again, in a paper published in 1858
on the Devonian fish Cephalaspis, Huxley once more attacked Agassiz and
Chambers, asserting that ' i t is clear t h a t the ordinary assumption, that the
earliest fishes belonged to low types of organization, falls to the ground ,.16
la Lyell, Principles (footnote 11), vol. 2, ch. 1.
la H u x l e y (footnote 7), 436; H u x l e y ' s italics.
15 T. H. Huxley, ' On c e r t a i n zoological a r g u m e n t s commonly a d d u c e d in favour o f t h e
hypothesis o f t h e progressive d e v e l o p m e n t o f a n i m a l life in t i m e ' (1855), repr. in Scientific
memoir8 (footnote 5), vol. 1, 300-304. D a r w i n to H u x l e y , 10 J u n o 1855, in F. D a r w i n a n d
=4.. Seward (eds.), More letters of Charles Darwin (2 vols., 1903, London), vol. 1, 82.
16 T. H. Huxley, ' On Cephalaspis a n d Pteraspis ' (1858), repr. in Scientific memoirs (footnote 5),
vol, 1,502-518 (p. 517).
Huxley's Defence of Darwin
529
And in the year of the publication of the Origin, he concluded a paper on the
stickleback with an uncompromisingly anti-progressionist conclusion:
I take this occasion of repeating an opinion I have often expressed, that
no known fact justifies us in concluding that the members of any given order
of animals present, at the present day, an organisation in essential respects
more perfect (in whatever sense that word may be used) than that which they
had in the earliest period of which we have any record of their existence. 1:
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3. The impact of the ' Origin of species '
I t is clear, then, t h a t in the years before Darwin published the Origin,
Huxley was not quite, as he later claimed, ' unbiased in respect of any doctrine
which presented itself ,.is He had taken a very firm line on the interpretation
of the history of life; and it is equally clear that the continued defence of this
line of interpretation was not likely to provide the most strategically effective
way of pleading Darwin's cause. Indeed, if we t r y to expunge from our minds
what we know of Huxley's history after 1858 and look only at these early
articles, we would, I think, be unlikely to predict correctly his response to the
Origin: the content of Darwin's book, and the conception of the history of life
that it embodied, do not chime harmoniously with his early work. But to
Huxley, the harmony was perfect. In a way, the principle of descent with
modification was not particularly important. Huxley's long-standing objection
had been not so much to theories of descent as such, as to what he considered to
be bad science, which only incidentally happened to argue for descent. So his
transition to an evolutionary view in 1858 represented no great shift. His
recognition of Darwin as a brilliant exponent of scientific naturalism represents
an underlying continuity in his attitudes, but it is not at once entirely clear
why he should have been so fervent in his defence of Darwin, although the
mystery can be partially dispelled if we realise t h a t Huxley was defending
not so much a disembodied theory of natural selection but the life and work of a
valued friend and patron who declined personally to defend his own theory in
public. However, the point that I wish to make here is t h a t when Huxley
decided to become Darwin's champion, he carried along with him a lot of the
trappings of his old views: with hindsight, we can see t h a t they were not very
well suited to a defence of the Origin, even though Huxley himself thought
that they were tailor-made for the job.
Just as important, Huxley's new enthusiasm was not for the fine detail of
the theory of natural selection, but merely for what he considered to be a
sound, naturalistic, general theory of descent with modification. Neither in
his first response to the Origin, nor in his subsequent defence of it, did he
enthuse over natural selection. But before examining his defence of Darwin
in detail, it will be well briefly to consider to what extent Huxley was in
Darwin's confidence before 1859, and indeed how harmonious was their
subsequent collaboration.
17 T. H. H u x l e y , ' O b s e r v a t i o n s on the d e v e l o p m e n t of some p a r t s of the skeleton of fishes '
(1859), repr. in Scientifio memoirs (footnote 5), vol. 2, 271-285 (p. 282).
is F. D a r w i n , Life and letters (footnote 1), vol. 2, 187.
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Michael Bartholomew
It seems that Huxley, like most of Darwin's friends, was pretty much in
the dark until he actually had a copy of the Origin in front of him. For
example, in an exchange of letters with Lyell during the summer of 1859,
Huxley expressed views that show that he really did not know what Darwin
was going to say. On the question of the mechanism for the emergence of
species, he told Lyell that he had ' a sort of notion . . . that in passing from
species to species " Natura fecit saltum " ,.19 This initial misapprehension,
and its continuance as a long-standing reservation concerning Darwin's
absolute rejection of saltations, should serve as a check on notions that the
two men were hand in glove.S~
More interestingly, Huxley's letter to Lyell reveals something of the
]iccnce that could follow from an assertion of the radical imperfection of
the fossil record. Lyell had had private motives for pioneering the proposal
that the fossil record could yield no reliable guide to the full range of plants
and animals that have ever lived; but it was not Lyell's motives, but the
freedom to speculate afforded b y the alleged imperfection, that was influential.
Lyell wanted to populate the wide open spaces of the past with representatives
from the complete range of modern classes of plants and animals, as far back as
the record stretches. Darwin, on the other hand, wanted to fill up the wide
open spaces with the twigs, branches, fallen boughs, trunk and roots of his great
branching tree. Precisely what Huxley wanted is not clear. It is significant
that when he later extravagantly declared to Darwin that he would be prepared
to go to the stake for one of the chapters in the Origin, 21 the chapter he had in
mind was chapter nine--the chapter on the imperfection of the fossil record.
It would be a great mistake to assume that because Lyell, Huxley and Darwin
all insisted on the imperfection of the fossil record, they all had the same picture
of what was going on during those vast, unrecorded eras. In this 1859 letter
to Lyell, for instance, Huxley evidently had in mind a picture of a Jurassic
landscape in which Jurassic men, similar to modern Australian aborigines,
speared the famous little Stonesfield Mammals, much in the way that presentday aborigines spear kangaroos. That is to say, he was suggesting that man
was thriving during the period when, according to present-day beliefs, the very
first mammals were emerging. Man, Huxley wrote, might be what he termed
a 'persistent type ' - - a type that has persisted through vast ages with little
or no change. 2~
Now the ability of Darwin's theory to accommodate and explain persistent
types was a point decidedly in its favour, but it is not, perhaps, the most
striking feature of the theory. But since Huxley had spent a good deal of
energy in attacking evolutionary and non-evolutionary systems which, in
various ways, postulated mysterious, inexorable, necessarily upward drives in
nature, and since the phenomenon of persistent types presented itself as an
1~ H u x l e y to Lyell, 25 J u n e 1859, in L. H u x l e y (ed.), Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
(2 vols., 1900, London), vol. 1, 173-174.
20 See T. H. H u x l e y , ' Criticisms on t h e " Origin o f species " ' (1864), repr. in Darwiniana
(footnote 1), 80-106 (p. 97).
31 H u x l e y to Darwin, 23 N o v e m b e r 1859, in F. Darwin, Life and letters (footnote 1), vol. 2,230.
23 H u x l e y to Lyell, in (footnote 19), 174. H u x l e y ' s letter w a s in r e p l y to a l e t t e r from Lyoll,
d a t e d 17 J u n e 1859 (Huxley papers, 6.20, I m p e r i a l College o f Science a n d Technology, London).
The bulk o f Lyell's letter h a s been p r i n t e d in L. Wilson (ed.), Sir Charles Lyell'8 scientific journals
on the species question (1970, New H a v e n a n d London), lvi-lvii~ 261-263.
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Huxley's Defence of Darwin
531
objection to such views, he seems to have considered t h a t Darwin's ends would
best be served by showing how smoothly Darwin's theory could account for
them. Accordingly, in a lecture at the Royal Institution, which was intended
to pave the way for the tbrthcoming Origin, he spoke almost entirely about
persistent types--though without offering a rigorous definition of ' t y p e '.
His object in this lecture was to show t h a t plants and animals have changed
remarkably little since their first appearance in the fossil record. He avoids
altogether what we might regard as the more persuasive evidence of the rather
spectacular, but smooth and gradual, changes in life t h a t have occurred since
the Cambrian. And Darwin's effective branching tree metaphor for the
history of life is nowhere to be found in this preview of the Origin. 2a
Darwin, despite his obvious pleasure at having the brilliant Huxley eager to
argue his case for him in public, was not entirely at ease with the way his
advocate was handling the evidence. In early 1860, for instance, Huxley gave
a lecture entitled ' On species and races ' at the Royal Institution. He ran
over the points of Darwin's case in a somewhat oblique fashion, and then gave
way to a typically florid and self-important conclusion in which he exhorted
his audience to cherish and venerate science. When Darwin received his copy
of the lecture, he diplomatically wrote to Huxley: ' I must have the pleasure of
telling you t h a t I think the whole conclusion one of the most eloquent
productions which I ever read in my life '; but he was evidently not entirely
convinced t h a t Huxley was on the right lines, for in a letter to Hooker he
expressed a somewhat different opinion concerning the lecture. He wrote:
' I must confess t h a t as an exposition of the doctrine, the lecture seems to me
an entire failure ,.~4
Three years after the publication of the Origin, by which time the chief
features should have been becoming clear, Huxley made another rather curious
defence of the doctrine. He had been invited to give the anniversary address
to the Geological Society, in the absence of the president, Homer, who was
convalescing abroad, and he decided to undertake a major review of the
principles of palaeontology. Here I am concerned only with the discussion of
progression which the address contained. His conclusion runs:
In the present condition of our knowledge and of our methods, one v e r d i c t 'not proven, and not provable '--must be recorded against all the grand
hypotheses of the palaeontologist respecting the general succession of life on
the globe. The order and nature of terrestrial life, as a whole, are open
questions. 25
All we can say, he goes on, is t h a t the overall change, as recorded by the fossil
record, is remarkably small, and that although progress can be seen in a few
lines, the evidence of the persistence of essentially unaltered structures is more
striking: all theories of necessary progress must fail.
23 T. H . H u x l e y , ' O n t h e p e r s i s t e n t t y p e s of a n i m a l life ' (1859), repr. in Scientific memoirs
(footnote 5), eel. 2, 90-93.
24 T. H . H u x l e y , ' O n species a n d races, a n d t h e i r origin ' (1860), repr. in Scientific memoirs
(footnote 5), eel. 2, 388-394. D a r w i n to H u x l e y , 11 A p r i l 1860 ( H u x l e y p a p e r s , 5.113, I m p e r i a l
College of Science a n d T e c h n o l o g y , L o n d o n ) ; D a r w i n to H o o k e r , 14 F e b r u a r y 1860, in F. D a r w i n ,
More letters (footnote 15), vol. 1, 139.
25 T. H . H u x l e y , ' Geological c o n t e m p o r a n o i t y a n d p e r s i s t e n t t y p o s o f lifo ' (1862), repr. in
Discourses biological and geological (Collected essays, vol. 8 (1894, L o n d o n ) ) , 272-304 (pp. 286-287).
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Michael Bartholomew
When he had given the address, Huxley wrote to Darwin: ' I want you to
chuckle with me over the notion I find a great m a n y people e n t e r t a i n - - t h a t the
address is dead against your views. The fact being, as they will by and by
wake up [to] see [is] that yours is the only hypothesis which is not negatived
by the facts,--one of its great merits being t h a t it allows not only of indefinite
standing still, but of indefinite retrogression ,.38 As before, Huxley was
clearly thinking t h a t the best defence of Darwin lay in persuading people t h a t
the doctrine postulated no necessary tendency to progress. Darwin was again
not quite so sure, and certainly was not moved to chuckle with Huxley. He
wrote back: ' I can say nothing against your side, but I have an " inner
consciousness " (a highly unphilosophical style of arguing!) that something
could be said against you; for I cannot help hoping that you are not quite
as right as you seem to be. Finally, I cannot tell why, but when I finished
your address I felt convinced t h a t many would infer t h a t you were dead against
change of species, but I clearly saw you were not . . . excuse this horrid
l e t t e r . . . '. ~7 Lyell, incidentally, was delighted with Huxley's address. He was
no doubt pleased to see aspects of his generally unsuccessful doctrine being
taken up, even though his bid to preclude evolution had failed, es
4. Huxley's campaign
Three years after the publication of the Origin, then, Huxley was still not
interpreting the history of life as a great branching tree. As early as 1857
Darwin had written to him, saying that all classification ought ' in accordance
with my heterodox notions, to be simply genealogical ';~9 but Huxley does not
seem to have taken up the challenge. He had not become a palaeontologist
out of choice, and he regarded describing and classifying fossils as something
of a chore; but even so, one might have expected him to seize on the opportunities for phylogenetic morphology faster than in fact he did. I t was not
until 1868 t h a t he risked a speculation about the descent of birds from the
dinosaurs, 3~ and not until 1874 t h a t he admitted t h a t Darwin had introduced
a new element--the element of phylogeny--into classification. His caution
in rushing forward with speculations about particular genealogies was
reasonable: he could see t h a t in the over-eager hands of men like Haeekel
phylogenetic reconstruction could easily deteriorate into wild guesswork.
In the same paper in which he acknowledged the new principle of phylogeny,
he went on to circumscribe its application. The problem with reconstructing
phylogenies, he said, is that
We are reduced to speculation--to the formation of more or less probable
hypotheses; and, though I believe that phylogonetic speculations are of great
interest and importance, and are to be reckoned among the most valuable
suggesters of, and guides to, investigation, I think it well to recollect, not
only that they are at present, for the most part, incapable of being submitted
to any objective test, but they are likely long to remain in that condition.
26 H u x l e y to D a r w i n , 6 M a y 1862, in L. H u x l e y (footnote 19), vol. l, 205-206.
2~ D a r w i n to H u x l e y , 10 M a y 1862, in F. D a r w i n ( f o o t n o t e 15), vol. 2, 232-234.
28 Lyell to H o r n e r , 23 F e b r u a r y 1862, in K . L y e l l (ed.), Life, letters and journals of Sir Charles
Lyell, Bart (2 vols., 1881, L o n d o n ) , vol. 2, 355-357.
29 D a r w i n to H u x l e y , 26 S e p t e m b e r 1857, in F. D a r w i n ( f o o t n o t e 15), vol. 1, 104.
a0 T. H . H u x l e y , ' O n t h e a n i m a l s w h i c h a r e m o s t n e a r l y i n t e r m e d i a t e b e t w e e n b i r d s a n d
reptiles ' (1868), repr. in Scientific memoirs ( f o o t n o t e 5), vol. 3, 303-313 (p. 312).
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The fossil record, he concluded, is far too patchy to validate speculations. 31
The influence of Lyell died hard.
But Huxley's attitude was governed by more than just an ingrained
Lyellian scepticism about the fossil record. He was never entirely at ease with
the essentially speculative nature of the evolutionary genealogist's enterprise,
even though he spoke approvingly of Gaudry's and Marsh's work. a2 I t is
significant that he attempted, in 1880, to enunciate an unwieldy and rather
obscure ' threefold law of evolution ': he wanted to tie up evolution with a law,
as quickly as possible, so t h a t its workings would appear clearcut, neat and
predictable. Similarly, he told Hooker that ' a law of variation ' was urgently
needed, and he always strenuously denied that Darwin's theory introduced
the reign of chance, aa But it is equally significant that, although in the paper
in which he launched his ' threefold law of evolution ' he declared that the
establishment of a ' scala animantium ' should be the ' foundation of scientific
t a x o n o m y ' a n d that all attempts to employ pre-Darwinian taxonomic
conceptions are ' necessarily futile ,,a4 he made no further substantial personal
contribution to his ambitious programme. Nor did he make any attempt to
establish a 'law of variation'. Evolution theory obstinately refused to yield
up the elegant formulations t h a t he desired.
Finally, an examination of Huxley's treatment of natural selection will
bring home the limited scope of his defenee of Darwin. This examination can
most eonveniently focus on his reply to Mivart's critique of Darwin's theory.
Vorzimmer concludes t h a t of all ' t h e scientists and non-seientists who
undertook to criticize [Darwin's] theory, none proved so formidable in the
content of his remarks or so powerful in their effect as Mivart ,.as In his
review of Darwin's Descent of man, and in his own book On the genesis of species,
Mivart meticulously and effectively gathered together all the objections t h a t
had been made against the theory of natural selection. He presented a ease
t h a t had to be answered, a6
Huxley, of course, took up the challenge. He decided to write a combined
review of Mivart and Wallace, who too was registering doubts about the
sufficiency of natural selection. In a letter to Haeckel, Huxley eharacterised
the pair as dogs that have been barking at Darwin's heels. 3v In his review,
Huxley paid no attention at all to the points t h a t Mivart had raised about
natural selection. Mivart had insisted, with perfect justification, that his
31 T. H . H u x l e y , ' O n t h e classification o f t h e a n i m a l k i n g d o m ' (1874), repr. in Scientific
memoirs (footnote 5), vol. 4, 3 5 - 6 0 ( p . 36).
a2 F o r H u x l e y ' s d i s c u s s i o n of G a u d r y , see ' P a l a e o n t o l o g y a n d e v o l u t i o n ' (presidential
a d d r e s s to t h e Geological Society, 1870), repr. in Discourses biological . . . (footnote 25), 340-388
(p. 350). F o r his d i s c u s s i o n o f M a r s h , see ' L e c t u r e s on e v c l u t i o n ' (1876), repr. in Science and
Hebrew tradition (Collected essays, vol. 4 (1893, London)}, 4 6 - 1 3 8 (p. 128). F o r a s o m e w h a t
different i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of H u x l e y ' s views a t this period, see M. J. S. R u d w i c k , The meaning of
f o s s i l s (1972, L o n d o n a n d N e w York), 249-254.
8a H u x l e y to H o o k e r , 4 S e p t e m b e r 1861, in L. H u x l e y (footnote 19), vol. 1,227. F o r H u x l e y ' s
c o m m e n t s on c h a n c e , see F. D a r w i n (footnote I), vol. 2, 199; a n d H u x l e y , D a r w i n i a n a (footnote 1),
110.
34 T. H . H u x l e y , ' O n t h e a p p l i c a t i o n of t h e l a w s o f e v o l u t i o n to t h e a r r a n g e m e n t o f t h e
v e r t e b r a t a a n d m o r e p a r t i c u l a r l y o f t h e m a m m a t i a ' (1880), repr. in Scientific .memoirs (footnote 5),
vol. 4, 457-472 (pp. 460-461).
85 p . V o r z i m m e r , Charles D a r w i n : the years of controversy (1972, L o n d o n ) , 226-227.
38[S. Mivart], ' R e v i e w of D a r w i n ' s Descent of m a n ', Quarterly review, 131 (1871), 47-90;
M i v a r t , On the genesis of species (1871, L o n d o n ) .
a7 H u x l e y to H a e e k e l , 2 :November 1871, in L. H u x l e y (footnote 19), vol. 1, 363.
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Michael Bartholomew
critique, which ran to over two hundred pages, was based on scientific evidence
and reasoning, and not on crude appeals to the authority of the Catholic
Church; but Huxley airily and rather arrogantly declined, as he put it, to
follow Mivart ' through the long string of objections in matters of detail which
[he] bring[s] against Mr Darwin's views ,.as He does not seem to have
admitted the possibility that there might have been substance in Mivart's
' string of objections '. But he. began to warm to his task when he reached
the couple of paragraphs which Mivart h~d devoted to the sixteenth century
Spanish Jesuit, Suarez. Mivart claimed that Suarez had long ago reconciled
the principle of evolution with Catholic teaching. To Huxley, of course, it
was the perfect challenge, and without further ado he elbowed his way into
Catholic theology and devoted, completely disproportionately, nearly half of
his reply to a discussion of the correct interpretation of Suarez. He thus
gave a standard exhibition of his celebrated zeal for smiting theologians, but
in the process the defenee of natural selection against Mivart's shrewd criticisms
went completely by the board. Mivart pointed out, in a brief rejoinder, t h a t
Huxley had failed to answer the important questions, a9
5. Conclusion
In his brief autobiography, Huxley very frankly wrote:
notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am
afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected
anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was
the architectural and engineering part of the business, t~
During the middle years of the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution by
natural selection was not a branch of the ' architectural and engineering part
of the business ' of natural science, and Huxley's characterisation of his own
interests m a y profitably be contrasted with Alfred Russel Wallace's, for Wallace
claimed t h a t the theory of natural selection could have been formulated only
by men possessing the very qualities that Huxley lacked. Both Darwin and
himself, Wallace recalled, had the ' mere passion of collecting ' rather than the
passion of ' s t u d y i n g the minutiae of structure, either internal or external '.
Wallace summed up this disposition as ' an intense interest in the mere variety
of living things ,.41 Now it will probably be objected that Wallace's modest
account does less than justice to his own and to Darwin's achievements, but
the sharp contrast between the attitudes of the originators of the theory
and the attitude of its most famous defender is significant.
To elaborate this contrast a little further, if the superb exposition and
illustration of the theory of natural selection presented by Wallace in his
D a r w i n i s m 42 is compared with the mixture of polemic, guarded phylogenetic
reconstruction, and rather discursive exposition t h a t constituted Huxley's
defence of Darwin, one begins to wonder if Huxley was really the right man for
the job. Certainly, his own scientific work underwent no radical change in
as T. H. H u x l e y , M r Darwin's critics (1871), repr. in Darwiniana (footnote 1), 120-186.
39 S. Mivart, ' E v o l u t i o n a n d its consequences: a reply to P r o f e s s o r H u x l e y ', Contemporary
review, 19 (1872), 168-197.
40 H u x l e y (footnote 10), 7.
41 L i n n e a n Society, The Darwin-Wallace celebration (1908, London), 8; Wallace's italics.
42 A. R. Wallace, Darwinism: an exposition of the theory of natural selection with some of its
applications (1889, L o n d o n ) .
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1859. His famous Man's place in nature of 1863, 43 for example, was not a
contribution to natural selection theory, and his scientific papers give no
indication of an interest in problems of variation, selection and inheritance.
Straightforward descriptions of fossils, and his burden of 'species work ',
continued to predominate in his published work. Ghiselin has observed that
Huxley did not use natural selection to solve biological problems, and has
concluded that he ' remained a pre-Darwinian anatomist as long as he lived ,.44
But of course Huxley was not alone in discerning no research projects that
the theory of natural selection might generate. As Coleman puts it, studies
of inheritance and variation were ' not in fashion ' during the quarter century
following the publication of the Origin: phylogenetic reconstruction was the
evolutionist's standard occupation. 4~ But even given this general absence
of research into natural selection, Huxley was not entirely typical; for, as we
have seen, his enthusiasm for phylogenetic reconstruction was heavily qualified.
However, although it is difficult to detect the impact of the theory of
natural selection on Huxley's day-to-day scientific activity, it obviously made a
substantial impact on his thinking concerning the relationship between ethics
and what he termed ' the cosmic process '.46 A review of this important aspect
of his work is beyond the scope of this article: m y more restricted aim has been
to examine some of his early views and his consideration of the Origin. Plainly,
his public defence of Darwin merged inextricably with his work as the Great
Victorian Prophet of Science, and any complete study of his life and w o r k - a study which is long overdue--will probably interpret his activities as aspects
of an integrated enterprise. Such a study would also include a closer and
mo~e systematic survey of Huxley's polemics than I have made in this
article. His polemics are most important; for whatever m a y have been,
in truth, the impact of natural selection on his scientific work, in the public
mind he was completely identified with Darwin's theory, and his failure--ff the
introduction of such risky, whiggish concepts may be permitted--to initiate
research projects on the study of variation, inheritance and selection must be
set against his monumental achievement in introducing and habituating
Victorians to the idea that they were descended from apes.
Perhaps as a first step toward a revaluation of Huxley, it will be prudent
to establish the precise nature of his defence of Darwin. I f my analysis is
correct, three points emerge. Firstly, his defence was encumbered with
material which he had carried with him from an earlier, and proleptieally
anti-Darwinian, phase. Secondly, he was either incompetent, or too highhanded, to answer effectively the careful criticisms made by serious critics
like Wallace and Mivart. And finally, despite his protestation that the Origin
had revolutionised biology, he made no fundamental changes in his own
scientific work.
43 T. H . H u x l e y , Evidence as to man's place in nature (1863, L o n d o n ) .
44 M. Ghiselin, ' T h e i n d i v i d u a l in t h e D a r w i n i a n R e v o l u t i o n ', New literary history, 3 (1971),
113-134 (p. 125).
45 W. C o l e m a n , ' O n B a t e s o n ' s m o t i v e s for s t u d y i n g v a r i a t i o n ', Acres du XIe Congr~s
International d'Histoire des Sciences, vol. l l (IV) (1968), 335-339 (p. 338). T h i s s a m e , c u r i o u s
i n t e r v a l in n a t u r a l selection s t u d i e s is n o t e d in, for e x a m p l e , B. J . N o r t o n , ' T h e b i o m e t r i c defense
o f D a r w i n ', Journal of the history of biology, 6 (1973), 283-316; a n d in E. B. F o r d , ' Ecological
g e n e t i c s ', in R . H a r r ~ (ed.), Scientific thought, 1900-1960 (1969, Oxford), 173-195.
4* See T. H . H u x l e y , Evolution and ethics and other essays (Collected essays, vol. 9 (1894,
London)).