While pop-culture geeks are saying, “May the Fourth be with you,” science geeks might celebrate Thomas Henry Huxley‘s birthday:
He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle, James Hutton’s Geology, and Hamilton’s Logic. In his teens he taught himself German, eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin, and enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original.
Later on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first on invertebrates, and later on vertebrates, all self-taught. He was skilled in drawing and did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion his grasp of theology was better than most of his clerical opponents. Huxley, a boy who left school at ten, became one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain.
He’s known for being Darwin’s bulldog, for coining the term agnostic, and for being Aldous Huxley’s grandfather.