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Huxley's defence of DarwinMichael Bartholomew aa Sub-Department of the History of Medicine, University CollegeLondon, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, EnglandVersion 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

H u x l e y ' s D e f e n c e o f D a r w i n

MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW Sub-Department of the History of Medicine,

University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, England

Received 14 August 1975

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 tha t Darwin and Wallace were to advance. Rather, Huxley's early views contained elements that 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 that 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 that animal forms must be classified only as more or less complex variations on four constant and discrete themes: species cannot be interpreted as stages on 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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526 Michael Bartholomew

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, but maintained that these corres- pondences 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) Jus t 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 by the mid 1850s he had a pret ty 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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notorious and successful book written by an anonymous amateur, he lashed out, calling the author an 'unfor tunate scientific parvenu' who, with 'whining assertions of sincerity ', had produced a 'mass 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 inter- pretation 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 . Darwin , Life and letters ( foo tno te 1), vol. 2, 188-189. 10 T. H. Hux ley , ' 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. Lyel l , Principles of geology (3 vols. , 1830-33, London) , vol. 1, eh. 9. 12 M. Ba r tho l omew, ' Lyel l a n d evo lu t ion : a n accoun t of Lyel l ' s response to t he prospect o f a n

evo lu t i ona ry 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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528 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 that class has followed class in ascending order of complexity. Lyell had said that all conclusions about progression are false, for we cannot know what the forms that may 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 that 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 af ter- -by a fog of undefined terms like ' higher ', ' lower ', ' embryonic ', ' noble ', 'degraded , and so on; but the important point is that Huxley, following Lyell, had combatted a basically fair, though injudicious, at tempt 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 that 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 that 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 Hux ley (footnote 7), 436; Hux ley ' s italics. 15 T. H. Huxley, ' On cer ta in zoological a rgument s commonly adduced in favour of the

hypothes is o f t he progressive deve lopment of an imal life in t i m e ' (1855), repr. in Scientific memoir8 (footnote 5), vol. 1, 300-304. Darwin to Huxley , 10 Juno 1855, in F. Darwin and =4.. Seward (eds.), More letters of Charles Darwin (2 vols., 1903, London) , vol. 1, 82.

16 T. H. Huxley, ' On Cephalaspis and Pteraspis ' (1858), repr . in Scientific memoirs (footnote 5), vol, 1,502-518 (p. 517).

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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:

3. The impact of the ' Origin of species '

I t is clear, then, that 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 ry 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 that 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 that 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 that 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. Huxley, ' Observat ions on the development 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. Darwin, Life and letters (footnote 1), vol. 2, 187.

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I t seems that Huxley, like most of Darwin's friends, was pret ty 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 by 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. I t 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. I t 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 present- day 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~ Hux ley to Lyell , 25 June 1859, in L. Hux ley (ed.), Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (2 vols., 1900, London) , vol. 1, 173-174.

20 See T. H. Huxley , ' Criticisms on the " Origin of species " ' (1864), repr. in Darwiniana (footnote 1), 80-106 (p. 97).

31 Hux ley to Darwin, 23 November 1859, in F. Darwin, Life and letters (footnote 1), vol. 2,230. 23 Huxley to Lyell , in (footnote 19), 174. Hux ley ' s le t te r was in rep ly to a l e t t e r f rom Lyoll,

d a t e d 17 J u n e 1859 (Huxley papers , 6.20, Imper ia l College of Science and Technology, London) . The bulk of Lyell 's le t te r has been p r in t ed in L. Wilson (ed.), Sir Charles Lyell'8 scientific journals on the species question (1970, New H a v e n and London) , lvi-lvii~ 261-263.

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objection to such views, he seems to have considered that 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 that 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 that 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 tha 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 that 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 that 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 verd ic 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 tha 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 , ' On t he 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), ee l . 2, 90-93.

24 T. H. H u x l e y , ' On species a n d races , a n d the i r or igin ' (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 Apr i l 1860 ( H u x l e y pape r s , 5.113, Impe r i a l College of Science a n d Techno logy , London) ; Da rwin to Hooker , 14 F e b r u a r y 1860, in F. Darwin , 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 pe r s i s t en t t ypos o f lifo ' (1862), repr. in Discourses biological and geological (Collected essays, vol. 8 (1894, London)) , 272-304 (pp. 286-287).

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When he had given the address, Huxley wrote to Darwin: ' I want you to chuckle with me over the notion I find a great many people enter ta in-- that 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 that it allows not only of indefinite standing still, but of indefinite retrogression ,.38 As before, Huxley was clearly thinking that the best defence of Darwin lay in persuading people that 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 that many would infer tha 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 opport- unities for phylogenetic morphology faster than in fact he did. I t was not until 1868 that he risked a speculation about the descent of birds from the dinosaurs, 3~ and not until 1874 that he admitted that 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 that 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 Darwin , 6 M ay 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 ( footnote 15), vol. 2, 232-234. 28 Lyel l to Horner , 23 F e b r u a r y 1862, in K. Lyel l (ed.), Life, letters and journals of Sir Charles

Lyell, Bart (2 vols. , 1881, London) , vol. 2, 355-357. 29 Da rwin to H u x l e y , 26 S ep t embe r 1857, in F . D a r w i n ( foo tno te 15), vol. 1, 104. a0 T. H. H u x l e y , ' On the a n i m a l s wh ich are m o s t n e a r l y i n t e r m e d i a t e be tween b i rds a n d

rept i les ' (1868), repr. in Scientific memoirs ( footnote 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 at t i tude 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 tha 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 at tempt to establish a 'law of variation'. Evolution theory obstinately refused to yield up the elegant formulations that 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 that 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 that had been made against the theory of natural selection. He presented a ease that 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 that Mivart had raised about natural selection. Mivart had insisted, with perfect justification, that his

31 T. H. H u x l e y , ' On t he c lass i f ica t ion o f the a n i m a l k i n g d o m ' (1874), repr. in Scientific memoirs ( footnote 5), vol. 4, 35-60 (p . 36).

a2 For H u x l e y ' s d i scuss ion 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 ' (president ial a d d r e s s to t he Geological Society, 1870), repr. in Discourses biological . . . ( footnote 25), 340-388 (p. 350). For his d i scuss ion o f M ar sh , see ' L ec tu 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)}, 46-138 (p. 128). Fo r a s o m e w h a t di f ferent i n t e rp r e t a t i on of H u x l e y ' s v iews a t th is period, see M. J . S. Rudwick , The meaning of foss i l s (1972, L o n d o n a n d New York) , 249-254.

8a H u x l e y to Hooker , 4 S e p t e m b e r 1861, in L. H u x l e y ( footnote 19), vol . 1,227. For H u x l e y ' s c o m m e n t s on chance , see F. D a r w i n ( footnote I), vol. 2, 199; a n d H u x l e y , Darwin iana ( footnote 1), 110.

34 T. H. Hux l ey , ' On t he app l i c a t i on of the l aws o f evolu t ion to t h e a r r a n g e m e n t o f t he v e r t e b r a t a a n d more pa r t i cu l a r l y o f t he m a m m a t i a ' (1880), repr. in Scientific .memoirs (footnote 5), vol. 4, 457-472 (pp. 460-461).

85 p . Vorz immer , Charles D a r w i n : the years of controversy (1972, London) , 226-227. 38[S. Mivar t ] , ' R e v i e w of D a r w i n ' s Descent of man ', Quarterly review, 131 (1871), 47-90;

Mivar t , On the genesis of species (1871, London) . a7 H u x l e y to Haeeke l , 2 :November 1871, in L. H u x l e y ( footnote 19), vol. 1, 363.

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534 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, that 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 may profitably be contrasted with Alfred Russel Wallace's, for Wallace claimed that 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 tudying 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 at t i tude 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 that 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. Huxley , Mr Darwin's critics (1871), repr. in Darwiniana (footnote 1), 120-186. 39 S. Mivart, ' Evolu t ion and its consequences: a reply to Professor Huxley ', Contemporary

review, 19 (1872), 168-197. 40 Hux ley (footnote 10), 7. 41 Linnean 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, London) .

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Huxley's Defence of Darwin 535

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: my 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 s tudy of his life and work- - a s tudy which is long overdue--will probably interpret his activities as aspects of an integrated enterprise. Such a s tudy 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 may 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 permit ted-- to initiate research projects on the s tudy 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 high- handed, 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, London) . 44 M. Ghiselin, ' T he i n d i v i d u a l in t he 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. Coleman, ' O n B a t e s o n ' s mo t i ve 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). Th i s same, cur ious i n t e rva l in n a t u r a l select ion s tud ies is n o t e d in, for examp le , B. J . Nor ton , ' The b iometr ic 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. Fo rd , ' Ecological gene t ics ', in R . Ha r r~ (ed.), Scientific thought, 1900-1960 (1969, Oxford) , 173-195.

4* See T. H. Hux l ey , Evolution and ethics and other essays (Collected essays, vol. 9 (1894, London) ) .

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