ABSTRACT
Getting across gentlemen of science was Thomas Henry Huxley's strengths, and getting science across was another; and sometimes the two went together. He was an extraordinarily effective popularizer, collecting and holding large audiences both at the fashionable Royal Institution in London and in various venues for working men. Priestley made his reputation in science with accessible works on electricity and light, and then on gases. Humphry Davy's election to the Presidency was assured by his invention of the miners' safety lamp, a great achievement of metropolitan science; and indeed he is one of the first whose laboratory science led directly to a new device. The common sense which Huxley espoused, and which involved his agnosticism, put the man of science and the man of sense more or less on a level; and one of Huxley's strategies in this kind of lecturing was to make his hearers realize that they did science all the time, as Moliere's M. Jourdain wrote prose.
