"I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth."

(or SOMETHING along those lines...)

Thomas Henry Huxley was born in 1825 in Ealing, England. Interested in science from a young age, Huxley enrolled in a medical apprenticeship at the age of 15. At 21, he was the medical assistant aboard the HMS Rattlesnake, where he voyaged to Australia and New Guinea. Here he was able to study numerous marine life When he returned to England he found that his research results had won him acceptance into the ranks of the English scientific establishment. He was soon acquainted with many of London's finest scientists and naturalists, including Charles Darwin.

"The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
~ T. H. Huxley

Upon the publishing of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, Huxley became an adamant defender of Darwin's theory of evolution. It was this devotion that earned him the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog". His most famous defense of evolution occurred during an 1860 meeting of the British Association.

Huxley, however, was not merely a blind follower of Darwinism. For instance, he was much more a saltationst than a gradualist like Darwin. He published much of his own work on evolution and the natural world. My collection shown at the right consists of five books written by Thomas Henry Huxley, Discourses Biological and Geological, Evolution and Ethics and other Essays,  Method and Results, Science and Education, and Hume. The books were issued as a collection upon Huxley's death in 1895 and purchased by myself in 2002.