Huxley was the most important biologist after August Weismann to insist on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. A fine communicator, he was a prominent populariser of biological science to the public. In the early 20th century he was one of the minority of biologists who believed that natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, and that evolution occurred by small steps and not by jumps. These opinions are now standard. Though his time as an academic was quite brief, he taught and encouraged a number of evolutionary biologists at the University of Oxford in the 1920s.