Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest.

Adrian Desmond. Reading, Massachusetts. Addison-Wesley, 1997.

He was Darwin's biggest booster, tantalizing and tormenting the public with talk of ape ancestors. He coined the term "agnostic" (1869) and elevated the status of the scientist at the expense of the clergy. His last pupil, the famous writer H. G. Wells, said that he provided "beyond question, the most educational year of my life." He was the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) who, according to Adrian Desmond, was the devil's disciple to Charles Darwin (considered a devil by many of his contemporaries because of his theory of evolution).

Huxley is a "contextual biography" that examines science in the context of its time. It looks at evolution's use in order to understand the class, religious, and political interests of the nineteenth century. For much of that time the intellectual world was based on the "character-forming" disciplines of Classics and Theology. Oxford and Cambridge were finishing schools for prosperous Anglicans - in 1870, against 145 Classics fellowships at Oxford there were only 4 fellowships in Science.

Huxley satirized Anglicanism, supernaturalism, and Oxford privilege. He fought to gain acceptance for evolution and the scientific method as important tools to discover useful and meaningful truths. His dynamic speaking ability drew the sorts of crowds that today are reserved for evangelists and rock stars. These efforts eventually brought the scientific profession, whose members systematically probe nature and conduct research in an open-ended quest toward truth, a wide measure of respectability. Ultimately, science has become a dominant force in the twentieth century.

This book is an epic story of a courageous genius who significantly influenced social changes from the Victorian to the modern age. It is written in a fast-paced and compelling style that matches its exhilarating and fascinating subject.