X club

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The X-Club was a group of intellectual British friends who met regularly from November 1864 to March 1892. Its nine members were the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker , the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley , the physicist John Tyndall , the mathematicians William Spottiswoode and Thomas Archer Hirst , the chemist Edward Frankland , the banker and archaeologist John Lubbock , the doctor and paleontologist George Busk , as well Herbert Spencer , sociologist and evolutionary theorist.

Its members were united by their naturalistic worldview. They advocated an upgrading of the role of the natural sciences over institutionalized religion, especially in education.

timeline

At the time of its founding, the relationship between the Bible and science was discussed. The British Association for the Advancement of Science drew up a declaration that science and the Bible are compatible if interpreted accordingly. In contrast, there were Bishop John William Colenso of Natal, who in Pentateuch (1862) described the Bible as unreliable, and the Reader Essays and Reviews , in which a historical-critical method of biblical interpretation was propagated. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863) were taken as the basis for a new worldview. Another conflict was that between the Ethnological Society and its breakaway, the slavery-defending Anthropological Society.

The members of the later X-Club were here on the side of Critical Exegesis and the Ethnological Society. The idea for a get-together was first put forward to Hooker by Huxley. The first meeting took place on November 3rd, 1864 at St. George's Hotel on London's Albermarle Street. Spottiswoode wasn't there until the second meeting in December. The original plan was to include William Benjamin Carpenter and James Fergusson , but they canceled. The appointments were mostly the first Thursday of each month, with a summer break from July to September, before the meetings of the Royal Society.

The club had only one rule, which was that there should be no rules. According to this rule, the idea of ​​systematically writing minutes was also rejected. William Kingdon Clifford , Charles Darwin, Asa Gray , Louis Agassiz , Auguste Laugel, Hermann von Helmholtz and Alfred Cornu were also present.

Initially, the names Blastodermic Club and Thorough Club were discussed, but finally the name X-Club, which was deliberately non-binding, was chosen. Albermarle Street was later moved to Almond's Hotel on Clifford Street; after Spottiswoode's death in 1886, the meetings were moved to the Athenaeum, in which the remaining men were members. They often met in the country and on excursions. In his later days the club's meetings were less and less attended. The meeting in March 1892 was the last.

evaluation

The roles of its members as government advisers, opinion leaders and functionaries of scientific associations earned the club the reputation of being a rope team of powerful people. Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley, for example, were successive presidents of the Royal Society; Tyndall and Huxley organized the collaboration on Nature magazine . Huxley and Spencer emphasized, however, that the club was only a circle of friends, not a clique. Its members just happened to have made careers later.

further reading

  • Ruth Barton, "Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others": Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851-1864 . In: Isis . Volume 89, Number 3, 1998, pp. 410-444, JSTOR 237141

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b X Club. In: Encyclopædia Britannica Online. , accessed on September 28, 2019.
  2. ↑ cf. Letter from Huxley to Edward Frankland dated February 3, 1888, In: Leonard Huxley: Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. Macmillan, 1900, Volume I, p. 261.
  3. ^ Journals of TA Hirst
  4. ^ Roy M. MacLeod: The X-Club a Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England. In: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 1970, pp. 305-322
  5. ↑ James R. Moore: Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia. In: Richard J. Helmstadter, Bernard Lightman: Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief. Macmillan, 1990, pp. 153-186.
  6. ↑ Ruth Barton, "Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others." Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851-1864. In: Isis , Vol. 89, No. 3, September 1998, pp. 410-444.

Web links

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