Episcopophagous Frogman

T. H. HUXLEY (330 pp.)--Cyril Bibby --Horizon ($5).

"Has a Frog a Soul, and of what Nature is that Soul, Supposing it to Exist?"

The question, which no longer seems urgent, was debated amid burning interest 90 years ago by London's Metaphysical Society, whose members included Cardinal Manning. William Ewart Gladstone and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Society represented a kind of summit conference in the cold war between science and religion --a war that made the Victorian mind, for all its surface confidence, highly fissionable.

The biggest frogman in the metaphysical puddle was a great, eloquent, side-whiskered, doggedly handsome jumping jack of all intellectual trades called Thomas Henry Huxley. For a while, belief seemed to be a question of Genesis or The Origin of Species, Adam or ape, God or Darwin--and Evolutionary Biologist Huxley, as "Darwin's bulldog," was widely suspected of not being pro-God. For the line Huxley himself preferred to tread, a sort of high wire stretched between scientific fact and an unknowable God. he coined the word agnostic.

Scientific Humanist. Something of T. H. Huxley's prodigious reputation--Darwin himself confessed that his own intelligence was "infantile" beside Huxley's--comes through in Biographer Cyril Bibby's book. He is abetted in forewords by Huxley's two greatly talented grandsons : Sir Julian and Aldous Huxley. Ironically. Scientist Julian praises grandfather's prose, while Stylist Aldous praises his pedagogics. Without much help from pedestrian Author Bibby, who bears down too heavily on Huxley's role as an educational reformer, the book crackles with examples of Huxley's wit as his other careers unfold--physician, biologist, lecturer, theological controversialist. The greatest "scientific humanist" of his age, Huxley was once tempted to become a brewer in Australia, an artist and a poet--though Huxley's quoted lines on the death of Tennyson prove nothing but that he had read Tennyson and knew he was dead.*

"A highly improbable combination of genes," in Grandson Julian's phrase, is needed to explain Huxley's many-faceted genius. His father, who died mad, was a poor schoolmaster at Great Ealing (a school attended by Thackeray, Cardinal Newman and W. S. Gilbert); Tom was a pupil there briefly, and hated it. As a "plebeian,"' which is what he proudly called himself, young Huxley could not hope for a university education in 19th century England, but a scholarship and a medical brother-in-law saved him from the obscurity of the uneducated. He graduated in medicine from London's Charing Cross Hospital, served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy where his duties were largely confined to dredging up and dissecting marine organisms. He sent a constant stream of reports and papers to learned societies back home, and at 26, he had made enough of an impression to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Thus he began his life task, which was, as he saw it, to "convert the Christian Heathen of these islands to the true faith," i.e., science.

Soapy Sam Was a Cad. Most educated Englishmen were scientific illiterates, but Huxley greatly helped change that situation. He had speculated about evolution some years before Origin of Species was published, and in the five years after it exploded on the world (in 1859), Huxley exploded with it by issuing 46 major publications on subjects ranging from the fishes of the Devonian epoch to the New Labyrinthodonts from the Edinburgh coalfield. With a "basilisk artistry" on the lecture platform and "a certain ruthlessness," Huxley loved to bandy texts and split hairs with the theologians. He signed letters in mock church Latin, was "Father-in-Science" to disciples, and called himself the episcopophagous (bishop-eating) Huxley. When "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, twitted him on his "simian ancestry," Huxley smoothly played the wounded gentleman and made the cleric look like a cad in his own see.

But to Huxley, the issues of science and religion were not nearly so clear as they are taken to be by some of his latter-day admirers, and his own high wire between faith and honest doubt sometimes trembled under him. He became bad-tempered every time his devoted Australian wife took another of his brood off to be baptized, but toward the end of his life took great stock in the Old Testament. He was no scientific bigot and mocked his materialist friend John Tyndall by asking how he could deduce Hamlet from the molecular structure of a mutton chop. He dismissed August Comte's fashionable positivism as "Catholicism without Christianity."

Huxley died in 1895, at 70, and was buried without official benefit of clergy. Throughout his life he had been a model of Victorian rectitude, partly to prove that a man could be moral without fearing Hell --although he said if the climate and company were right he preferred Hell to annihilation. To his scientific allies who made a fetish of X, the unknown, he had written: "If I am to talk about that of which I have no knowledge at all, I prefer the good old word God, about which there is no scientific pretence."

* And oh! sad wedded mourner seeking still For vanished handclasp, drinking in thy fill . . .

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