[With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in Huxley's career.
From his return to England in 1850 till 1854 he had endured four years
of hard struggle, of hope deferred; his reputation as a zoologist had
been established before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by
his personal energy and power. When at length settled in the
professorship at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking himself
more than a beginner who had learned to work in one corner of the
field of knowledge, still needing deep research into all kindred
subjects in order to know the true bearings of his own little portion,
that he treated the next six years simply as years of further
apprenticeship. Under the suggestive power of the "Origin of Species"
all these scattered studies fell suddenly into due rank and order; the
philosophic unity he had so long been seeking inspired his thought
with tenfold vigour, and the battle at Oxford in defence of the new
hypothesis first brought him before the public eye as one who not only
had the courage of his convictions when attacked, but could, and more,
would, carry the war effectively into the enemy's country. And for the
next ten years he was commonly identified with the championship of the
most unpopular view of the time; a fighter, an assailant of
long-established fallacies, he was too often considered a mere
iconoclast, a subverter of every other well-rooted institution,
theological, educational, or moral.
It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in
the average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies.
His name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual
gravity beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held
"without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by
W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism,
materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"--in
token of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of
the Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by
the statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as a Bradlaughite."
But now official life began to lay closer hold upon him. He came
forward also as a leader in the struggle for educational reform,
seeking not only to perfect his own biological teaching, but to show,
in theory and practice, how scientific training might be introduced
into the general system of education. He was more than once asked to
stand for Parliament, but refused, thinking he could do more useful
work for his country outside.
The publication in 1870 of "Lay Sermons," the first of a series of
similar volumes, served, by concentrating his moral and intellectual
philosophy, to make his influence as a teacher of men more widely
felt. The "active scepticism," whose conclusions many feared, was yet
acknowledged as the quality of mind which had made him one of the
clearest thinkers and safest scientific guides of his time, while his
keen sense of right and wrong made the more reflective of those who
opposed his conclusions hesitate long before expressing a doubt as to
the good influence of his writings. This view is very clearly
expressed in a review of the book in the "Nation" (New York 1870 11
407).
And as another review of the "Lay Sermons" puts it ("Nature" 3 22), he
began to be made a kind of popular oracle, yet refused to prophesy
smooth things.
During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than
upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of
four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in
addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work,
and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the
popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the
progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological
researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian
lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870. But from 1870
onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less.
For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after
another. His administrative work on learned societies continued to
increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological
Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the
Anthropological,] "the plan," [as he calls it,] "for uniting the
Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes 'Society'
which occupies itself chiefly with woman)." [He became President of
the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to
1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied
no small portion of his time and thought, "for he had formed a very
high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this
country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short
through any lack of exertion on his part" (Sir M. Foster, Royal
Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)
The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known. He
published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on
two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other
on Scientific Instruction, which continued until 1875.
The three addresses which he gave in the autumn, and his election to
the School Board will be spoken of later; in the first part of the
year he read two papers at the Ethnological Society, of which he was
President, on "The Geographical Distribution of the Chief
Modifications of Mankind," March 9--and on "The Ethnology of Britain,"
May 10--the substance of which appeared in the "Contemporary Review"
for July under the title of "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology"
("Collected Essays" 7 253). As President also of the Geological
Society and of the British Association, he had two important addresses
to deliver. In addition to this, he delivered an address before the
Y.M.C.A. at Cambridge on "Descartes' Discourse."
How busy he was may be gathered from his refusal of an invitation to
Down:--]
26 Abbey Place, January 21, 1870.
My dear Darwin,
It is hard to resist an invitation of yours--but I dine out on
Saturday; and next week three evenings are abolished by Societies of
one kind or another. And there is that horrid Geological address
looming in the future!
I am afraid I must deny myself at present.
I am glad you liked the sermon. Did you see the "Devonshire man's"
attack in the "Pall Mall?"
I have been wasting my time in polishing that worthy off. I would not
have troubled myself about him, if it were not for the political
bearing of the Celt question just now.
My wife sends her love to all you.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[The reference to the "Devonshire Man" is as follows:--Huxley had been
speaking of the strong similarity between Gaul and German, Celt and
Teuton, before the change of character brought about by the Latin
conquest; and of the similar commixture, a dash of Anglo-Saxon in the
mass of Celtic, which prevailed in our western borders and many parts
of Ireland, e.g. Tipperary.
The "Devonshire Man" wrote on January 18 to the "Pall Mall Gazette,"
objecting to the statement that "Devonshire men are as little
Anglo-Saxons as Northumbrians are Welsh." Huxley replied on the 21st,
meeting his historical arguments with citations from Freeman, and
especially by completing his opponent's quotation from Caesar, to show
that under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the
German. The assertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between
the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous
question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or
the pure Irish? Milesian, Firbolg, or Cruithneach?
But the "Devonshire Man" did not confine himself to science. He
indulged in various personalities, to the smartest of which, a parody
of Sydney Smith's dictum on Dr. Whewell, Huxley replied:--]
"A Devonshire Man" is good enough to say of me that "cutting up
monkeys is his forte, and cutting up men is his foible." With your
permission, I propose to cut up "A Devonshire Man"; but I leave it to
the public to judge whether, when so employed, my occupation is to be
referred to the former or to the latter category.
[For this he was roundly lectured by the "Spectator" on January 29, in
an article under the heading "Pope Huxley." Regardless of the rights
or wrongs of the controversy, he was chidden for the abusive language
of the above paragraph, and told that he was a very good anatomist,
but had better not enter into discussions on other subjects.
The same question is developed in the address to the Ethnological
Society later in the year and in "Some Fixed Points in British
Ethnology" (see above), and reiterated in an address from the chair in