Huxley: Evolution's High Priest

by Adrian J . Desmond (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1997

  $3.25

  By 1870, Thomas Huxley, Darwins' bulldog, had become the prophet of the new world of science. He was the salesman of evolution and the symbol of the advancing middle-classes. This study of the rise of the professioal and the changes in industrial society in the late-19th century, and shows how Huxley triumphed over society. It is the story of the first agnostic (Huxley coined the word) whose life summed up the social challenges from the Victorian to the modern age. This is volume two of Desmond's biography, following on from Huxley: The Devil's Disciple .

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $3.25

  T.H. Huxley (1825-1895) - Darwin's bulldog - led a far more fascinating and outgoing life than the reclusive Darwin. He did battle with God and Gladstone, sat on royal commissions and campaigned for elementary education. He carried Darwin's fight to the public and outraged the old order with his talk of the material basis of life. It was a life lived at high speed and to the full, embracing all the Victorian hopes and fears. Desperately trying to scratch a living in his young days, he suffered mental collapses as he failed to bring his fiancee over from Sydney (he raised the cash after four years). The author of this book uses the life of Huxley to illustrate and illuminate the second - and far more turbulent - half of the 19th century. Adrian Desmond is the author of Darwin which won the James Tait Black Prize in Britain, the Comisso Prize in Italy and the Watson Davis Prize in America.