_INTRODUCTORY NOTE_
_Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) was born at Baling, near London, and
having studied medicine went to sea as assistant surgeon in the navy.
After leaving the Government service, he became Professor of Natural
History at the Royal School of Mines and Fullerian Professor of
Physiology at the Royal Institution, and later held many commissions
and received many distinctions in the scientific world. His special
field was morphology, and in it he produced a large number of
monographs and several comprehensive manuals._
_It is not, however, by his original contributions to knowledge that
Huxley's name is best known to readers outside of technical science,
but rather by his labors in popularisation and in polemics. He was one
of the foremost and most effective champions of Darwinism, and no
scientist has been more conspicuous in the battle between the doctrine
of evolution and the older religious orthodoxy. Outside of this
particular issue, he was a vigorous opponent of supernaturalism in all
its forms, and a supporter of the agnosticism which demands that
nothing shall be believed "with greater assurance than the evidence
warrants"--the evidence intended being, of course, of the same kind as
that admitted in natural science._
_Huxley's interests thus extended from pure science into many adjoining
fields, such as those of theology, philosophy (where he wrote an
admirable book on Hume), and education. Of his attitude toward this
last, a clear idea may be gained from the following address on "Science
and Culture," a singularly forcible plea for the importance of natural
science in general education._
_In all his writings Huxley commands a style excellently adapted to his
purpose: clear, forcible, free from mannerism, yet telling and often
memorable in phrase. Whatever may be the exact magnitude of his
services to pure science, he was a master in the writing of English for
the purposes of exposition and controversy, and a powerful intellectual
influence on almost all classes in his generation._