Science and the Public 349ticed in his laboratory at South Kensington, a newly built facility com-
pleted in 1871.^35 But admittance to the lab was restricted to experts and
those training to be experts. In his discussion of biology museums a few
pages later in the essay, Huxley made it clear that the laboratory was not
a public space. The ideal biology museum would be divided in two, one
part open to the public, which would give them “easy and unhindered
access to such a collection as they can understand and appreciate,” and
the other part open every day to men of science to give them access “to
the materials of science” in a laboratory- type setting.^36 The democratic
nature of science became lost in Huxley’s stress on expertise developed
only in the laboratory.
One more theme emerges in Huxley’s essay “On the Study of Biology”
that was characteristic of how scientifi c naturalists read social and politi-
cal messages into the natural world. In discussing the scope of biology,
Huxley claimed that it covered “all the phenomena which are exhibited
by living things,” including the higher forms. To Huxley this meant that
humans and all their ways came under the heading of biology. Huxley
gave an evolutionary justifi cation for subsuming psychology, politics,
political economy, and civil history within the domain of the biologist.
The “rudiments and outlines of our own mental phenomena are traceable
among the lower animals” who have “their economy and their polity.”
If the “polity of bees and the commonwealth of wolves fall within the
purview of the biologist proper,” Huxley declared, “it becomes hard to
say why we should not include therein human affairs.” But biologists had,
at great sacrifi ce, given up civil history to a different branch of science,
which, following Auguste Comte, Huxley called “sociology,” though he
warned that it should not seem so surprising if a biologist apparently tres-
passed “in the region of philosophy or politics” or meddled with “human
education; because, after all, that is a part of his kingdom which he has
only voluntarily forsaken.”^37 Huxley’s biological imperialism justifi ed the
use of biological theories by professional scientists to solve social prob-
lems. It provided Huxley and his allies the cultural authority they craved.
Defenders of the Anglican- aristocratic status quo denounced this sweep-
ing notion of biology as reductionist and materialistic.
But Huxley found a new target in the late eighties when he fl agrantly
trespassed into the social domain in his essay “The Struggle for Exis-
tence in Human Society” (1888), which was followed by “Capital—the
Mother of Labour” (1890), “On the Natural Inequality of Men” (1890),
“Natural Rights and Political Rights” (1890), and “Government: Anarchy
or Regimentation” (1890). In these essays Huxley, ever the apologist for
middle- class ideals, attacked socialism as an unscientifi c form of a priori