Rob Rippingale attended our recent meeting to give a discourse on the Life and Times of Thomas Huxley, and it certainly raised a myriad of interesting facts. Rob is a retired academic researcher based at Curtin University, where he specialised in the topic of Plankton and Algal Bloom, but Rob came to talk about Thomas Huxley and the influence that gentleman had on his era and beyond. Huxley was born in 1825 and initially he went to the Greater Ealing School, but left at the age of 10 after “two years of pandemonium”! Thomas then engaged in 5 years of self-education, following which he went to London in 1840 to become an apprentice apothecary. In 1841 Thomas studied anatomy at Sydenham College, and the following year he was awarded a Scholarship to the Charing Cross Hospital (valued at 42 pounds per annum). In 1845 Huxley joined the Navy as an Assistant Surgeon, and boarded the HMS Rattlesnake – by then a survey ship. Thomas established his scientific reputation by the papers he wrote on this voyage, leading to his election as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. He met Henrietta in Sydney in 1847, and eventually married her in 1855. They had 8 children. Amongst the people that Huxley met and interacted with were Charles Darwin, Charles Kingsley and W S Gilbert (of G & S fame). Huxley was said to be Darwin’s ‘Bulldog’!