Some have noted the poetic qualities of his prose style, comparing some of his rhetorical methods to those of his contemporary Matthew Arnold.
By the time of the popular emergence of Darwinism in the 1860s, Huxley had already established his reputation as a scientist. He was born at Ealing, Middlesex, near London, on 4 May 1825, the seventh child of George Huxley, a rural schoolmaster from whom he inherited artistic ability, "a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy," and Rachel Withers Huxley, whom he credits in his 1890 "Autobiography" for giving him his physical appearance and his quick-witted mental ability. Recalling a childhood game of "preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen" to imitate the parish vicar, he also notes that his name, Thomas, appropriately linked him with the biblical doubter, the "Apostle with whom I have always felt most sympathy." Huxley's early education was primarily at home through independent reading, and by age sixteen, when he began medical studies under a Dr. Chandler at Rotherhithe, he had mastered German, French, and Italian and had read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-1833), William Hamilton on logic, and much of Thomas Carlyle, whose influence upon him was considerable.
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