Philip Henry Gosse
Philip Henry Gosse (April 6, 1810 – August 23, 1888) was an English naturalist and science popularizer, now best known for his attempt to reconcile biblical literalism with uniformitarianism but also known for his invention of the sea-water aquarium and marine biology studies. Although later eclipsed by his talented son, Edmund Gosse, Philip made an important contribution to the knowledge of his time, although his Christian fundamentalism made it difficult for him to accept the theory of evolution. He was born in Worcester in 1810 and as a boy worked in the counting house of the firm of George Garland and Sons in the town of Poole. In 1827 he went to Newfoundland as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co. He left Newfoundland in 1835 for Compton, Lower Canada where he farmed for three years. He then taught briefly in Alabama and returned to England in 1839. Gosse was a brilliant student of Newfoundland entomology and a shrewd observer of society in the Carbonear area.
On his return to England, Philip married Emily Bowes, a devout Christian who wrote sixty beautiful gospel tracts that have passed through many editions and have been widely circulated. Regrettably, she died a painful death at their London home, and was no longer able to assist with her husband's trips to their St. Marychurch seaside villa to study his great passion — the marine world. Philip never recovered from the loss, published a book mourning her last days on earth, and following her burial at Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, moved more permanently to Devon.
Early life and writing
Philip Gosse became, in his early career, a popular science writer. His first work, Entomologia Terrae Novae, was the first scientific study of Canadian insects. Other works examined topics such as Jamaican wildlife, microscopy, the American South, and his special fascination - marine zoology — which eventually enabled him to demonstrate of the world's first stable sea-water aquaria at London Zoo, Regent's Park. He made his living writing on these and other subjects of interest to naturalists worldwide, and sometimes wrote educational textbooks (two of which covered zoology and "natural history"). Gosse's other books included Canadian Naturalist (1840), The Ocean (1844), Birds of Jamaica (1847), Naturalists Sojourn in Jamaica (1851), Aquarium (1854), and A Manual of Marine Zoology (1855-56). In 1857, however, he published what became a most controversial philosophical book: Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot.
The Controversy of Omphalos
The problem of the age of the earth was a vexed one for much of the 19th century. The work of James Hutton had suggested that the earth had to be much, much older than those who trusted biblical chronology could accept. Regardless of whether one believed James Ussher's date of 4004 BC to be the true date of Earth's origin, no biblically reconstructed date for the creation of the earth was long enough to be close to the time that was implied by geology or, later, zoology.
Various theories had been proposed prior to the publication of Omphalos. Among them was the notion that the biblical "days" were metaphorical and corresponded to much longer periods of time (so-called "interval theory"). Another proposed that time may have worked differently before the Fall, and still others made a forthright appeal to God's omnipotence, meaning he could cause apparently long geological ages to occur in short periods of time.
Gosse, however, pointed out that life ran in cycles: birth and death and birth again; rain to river to ocean to cloud to rain. Chicken from egg, egg from chicken. If one assumed a creation from nothing, there must always be traces of previous existence that never actually existed, otherwise certain things would not work. The name Omphalos hearkened back to the earlier Christian debate over Adam's navel, the existence of which would have implied his non-existent birth from a non-existent mother — Omphalos being Greek for "navel". Gosse compiled several hundred pages of examples of similar thoughts, then tied it all together by stating that when creation occurred, apparent records of events occurring that actually did not occur — he called them "prochronic", meaning "outside time" — must have been rife throughout the world. Was it not reasonable to argue that fossils and geologic strata and so on were merely prochronic artifacts of a non-existent time pre-dating the actual Creation? This idea became known as the Omphalos hypothesis.
Gosse's theory was unsatisfactory to both sides of the debate, and his book was savaged by critics on both ends of the spectrum. Those of a scientific bent and those of religious mind generally rejected the theory on the grounds that they could not accept that God would play such an enormous hoax. There was simply no point to it, and some other explanation was deemed necessary. Two years later, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published, and another exit from Gosse's endless ring became apparent: rather than a circle, the history of life was an ever-widening spiral, emanating from a single point in the distant past. Fossils and so on were the record of that spiral.
Later life
Gosse was crushed by the harsh reception of his philosophical book, and committed much of the remainder of his days to religious devotion, and crime and murder stories, though his script for Actinologia was published 1858-60.
Biographies
Philip Gosse's life from a few years before the publication of Omphalos to his death, is recorded to some extent in Father and Son (1907), written by his son — Sir Edmund William Gosse, who became a famous biographer in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Father and Son was a tale of young Edmund's struggle to understand and write about the world, and the shadow cast over creative imagination by his father's puritanical religious convictions. John Rendle-Short's book Green Eye of the Storm (ISBN 0851517277 1998) argues that Edmund's embittered anti-Christianity tarnished the objectivity of his portrayal of his father.
Writer Jorge Luis Borges is responsible for some of Philip Gosse's fame today, as Borges' short essay "The Creation and P. H. Gosse" explores the rejection of Omphalos. Borges argues that its unpopularity stemmed from Gosse's explicit (if inadvertent) outlining of what he claimed were absurdities in the Genesis story.
Stephen Jay Gould also wrote an essay on Gosse, which can be found in the book The Flamingo's Smile.
The definitive biography of Philip Henry Gosse is Glimpses of the Wonderful by Ann Thwaite (2002).
Philip Gosse, the grandson of P. H. Gosse, became a keen naturalist and qualified doctor who published a book entitled Memoirs of a Camp Follower in March 1934, later issued as A Naturalist goes to War (1942). It contains memories of his time in the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps) in France/Belgium in 1915–1917 and India in 1917–1918. It is an account of much field work: on an average day he caught and skinned mice, shrews and small mammals, which were then sent to the Natural History Museum, and also covered some of the horrors of war, and army anecdotes. He was also appointed as rat officer to the 2nd Army.