Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
spring of 1860, he had in some sense crossed his own professional Rubicon.
7
Huxley the public voice of science was destined from that time forward to
become greater, and Huxley the scientific practitioner less. By middle age he
had largely abandoned the laboratory for the scientific pulpit and a crushing
weight of administrative duties. Huxley the scientific rhetorician and leader
was found to be so much in demand that Huxley the scientist was always in
danger of being put out of business.
In the end, despite the precocious beginning of his scientific career—his
first publication at age twenty and election to the Royal Society just a few
years later—the number of his nontechnical publications would far exceed
the number of his scientific ones. Being drawn away from scientific work
was something Huxley particularly regretted, but the enormity of his rhe-
torical talents in this period of enormous need made it inevitable that he
would be pressed into service to carry forth the discursive and administra-
tive work that was transforming British science. He came with a mind hard-
wired for public communication, an astute talent for negotiating difficult
and complex problems of adaptation, and the ability to bring every available
means of persuasion to bear upon a multitude of tasks and audiences.
The robust richness of Huxley's rhetorical career is easy to miss, espe-
cially for those who have been exposed only to those pervasive historical
glosses that sum up his career by referencing just a handful of his most
agonistic moments in defense of Darwin's work. Such treatments falsely
narrow the scope of his public career. Huxley indeed was a controversialist.
He entered public life as an angry young man, and this fire burned even in
the elder statesman's declining years. But his bottom line was the welfare
of science, and this made him wary even of his own disposition to verbal
aggression, lest it derail this greater good. His correspondence is dotted
with testimony to this struggle, acknowledgments of his love for battle but
also of the urgency of a countervailing diplomacy. When the editor John
Morley wrote him in 1878, for instance, once again trying to draw him into
some unnamed fight, undoubtedly with an eye on profits such as he had
reaped from some of Huxley's earlier polemics in the
Fortnightly Review
, the
scientist recoiled, declaring that “controversy is as abhorrent to me as gin
to a reclaimed drunkard; but oh dear! It would be so nice to squelch that
pompous impostor.”
8
A decade later, in a feigned rebuke thrown in the
direction of Herbert Spencer after a similar effort to stir up his polemical
bloodlust, we find Huxley's abiding sense of the overriding public concerns
that always stood guard.
