ABSTRACT
Thomas henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, but he was too great a man for his centenary to find him finally appraised and uncontroversially labelled. It was while in training for the medical profession that he published his first original work at the age of twenty. From 1870 onwards Huxley began to diverge from purely scientific themes into fields of more general interest, and, like that of Voltaire, his fame rest largely on the production of his last twenty years. Elementary education might have been secularized, whereas Huxley supported the teaching of the Bible in elementary schools. Huxley his great gifts might have carried him as far in politics as Paul Bert was carried in France, but luckily for science he refused the offer of a seat in Parliament, and his last scientific paper was published only seven years before his death in 1895.
