Darwin's Bulldog left school at ten and taught himself nearly everything
Thomas Henry Huxley had just two years of formal schooling before his family's money ran out when he was ten. He went on to teach himself German well enough to translate for Darwin, read Aristotle in Greek, become perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of his era, and coin the word agnosticism.
Huxley was born in Ealing in 1825, one of eight children of a mathematics teacher whose school closed. At 13 he was apprenticed to medical practitioners, including one working among London's desperately poor in Rotherhithe. At Charing Cross Hospital his first paper, in 1845, identified a previously unknown layer in the inner sheath of hair, still called Huxley's layer. Deep in debt and too young for a surgeon's licence, he joined the Royal Navy instead.
Aboard HMS Rattlesnake, which sailed on 3 December 1846 to survey New Guinea and Australia, the nominal assistant surgeon worked as a marine naturalist. He grouped jellyfish with related polyps into a class he named Hydrozoa, noticing that all shared two cell layers around a central cavity, a hallmark of what are now called cnidarians. He also showed that the puzzling Appendicularia and sea squirts were both tunicates. Returning to England in 1850, he quickly joined the Royal Society as a fellow and collected its medal at 26, yet he complained that science earned praise rather than a living. From 1854 he taught natural history as a professor at the Royal School of Mines, keeping that post for 31 years.
Huxley was never fully sold on natural selection or on gradual change, but he defended Darwin in public with unmatched energy, famously clashing with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860; some historians suspect parts of the story were embellished later. Comparing the fossil Archaeopteryx with the small dinosaur Compsognathus, he correctly argued that birds descend from small carnivorous dinosaurs. He introduced the term agnosticism in 1869 to separate what can be known from what cannot.
His 1893 lecture on evolution and ethics, translated into Chinese, reshaped how Darwin was rendered there. He served as president of the Royal Society from 1883 to 1885 before depression pushed him into retirement. He died at Eastbourne in 1895, and some two hundred mourners, including Joseph Lister, attended a funeral with no invitations.
Source: Thomas Henry Huxley
