Huxley: The Devil's Disciple.

Huxley: The Devil's Disciple. Brilliant, racy and audacious, ADRIAN DESMOND's Huxley: thedevil's disciple drives a path by natural selection to the leadingposition in this issue's column as insistently as Thomas HenryHuxley himself sliced through the impediments of Victorian science andsociety (xviii+475 pages, 38 ilustrations. 1994. London: Michael Joseph;ISBN ISBNabbr.International Standard Book NumberISBNInternational Standard Book NumberISBNn abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m0-7181-3641-1 hardback [pounds]20.). This excellent new biographyof the 'episcopophagous' naturalist treats him not as one ofthe illustrious dead, but as a man of tempestuous tem��pes��tu��ous?adj.1. Of, relating to, or resembling a tempest: tempestuous gales.2. Tumultuous; stormy: a tempestuous relationship. flesh and blood amid aturbulent imperial nation. From the outset the contrast with Darwin isstrongly delineated (DESMOND co-authored the latter's recentbiography, as well as popularizing hot-blooded dinosaurs). Even thenames of the ships in which the two apprenticed as tropical naturaliststell a different tale. Not for Huxley the aristocratic ring of theBeagle and the role of gentleman-companion, but the place ofsurgeon's mate on the Battle-snake, a leaky old sail tub turnedsurvey ship 'making straight the path of the steamers' insidethe Barrier Reef -- and whose reptilian name-sake's venom andfrisson served as premonition of Huxley's style on paper and inpublic performance. Yet when the publication of the Origin left Darwin avomiting invalid, it was Huxley and his circle who defended the book tothe scientists and public as the Whitworth gun of the Liberal arsenal(Huxley's battle imagery is ubiquitous). Huxley rose young and fastto equal glory and notoriety, driven on by financial necessity toconquer or die, whilst Darwin pondered for years of moneyed and secludedleisure. At times Huxley appears a role model for the contemporaryacademic -- meritocratic mer��i��toc��ra��cy?n. pl. mer��i��toc��ra��cies1. A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement.2. a. , flogged and flogging himself through insanelecture loads, money troubles and editorial deadlines, impatient withthe cosy gentility of his predecessors, a hard bargainer, andpolitically astute enough when furthering the cause of his deeply heldconvictions, thinking nothing of reviewing the Origin in three separatejournals or of scooping three professorships, all of which he amplyfulfilled. Yet the paradoxes in Huxley are no less forcefully drawn. Thepopularizer with the plebeian plebeian(Latin, plebs) Member of the general citizenry, as opposed to the patrician class, in the ancient Roman republic. Plebeians were originally excluded from the Senate and from all public offices except military tribune, and they were forbidden to marry patricians. touch aimed at government not of thepeople but the professionals. Darwin's champion was curiously slowto grasp the full evolutionary implications of Darwin's thesis, hisinterest lying less in the history of species than in the harmoniousgeometry of their present patterning; his scepticism of progression diedhard -- indeed on the eve On the Eve (Накануне in Russian) is the third novel by famous Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, best known for his short stories and the novel Fathers and Sons. of 1859 he still awaited the discovery ofSilurian fossil men. Despite his savage manner, too, Huxley'svision of nature was infinitely more noble and serene thanDarwin's; a Huxley public lecture on scientific truth as the newrationale for belief could be heralded, apparently without a whiff ofirony, by a rendition of Haydn's Creation. And the intellectualradical was a Victorian-style patriot with a soft spot for Tennyson andunpalatable sentiments concerning the deserts of Australian aborigines aborigines:see Australian aborigines. ,very much one of those British scientists who (in a pithy DESMONDphrase) annexed the animal kingdom just as surely as the Royal Navyannexed the world. This is a book bursting with ideas, images andinsights. It is the prodigious biography of ano less prodigious and complicated man.