Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May, 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative anatomy. A prominent defender of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, he was the grandfather of Julian, Aldous and Andrew Huxley. He was a critic of organised religion and devised the words "agnostic" and "agnosticism" to describe his own views.[1]

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Quotes·Quotations by Thomas Henry Huxley

History

@ To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
"On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences" (1854) page 29

Life

@ Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.
One of a series of exchanges when Richard Owen repeated generally repudiated claims about the Gorilla brain in a Royal Institution lecture. Athenaeum (13 April 1861) p.498; Browne Vol 2, p.159.

Science

@ Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.
Darwiniana: the Origin of Species (1860).

¶ The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley