1825–1895 · English biologist and educator, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’
Huxley was a self-taught comparative anatomist who became Darwin’s most combative public defender — the man who earned the nickname Darwin’s Bulldog after the 1860 Oxford clash with Bishop Wilberforce. He spent at least as much energy on schooling as on zoology, serving on the first School Board for London and lecturing tirelessly on what ordinary people should be taught and why. In this particular address he introduced himself to an audience of working men not as a professor but as “a man who works with his hands—a handicraftsman”, which is the register the whole speech is pitched in.