The book, set as a conversation between a father and his son ( a son Gosse did not yet have ), was widely praised and demonstrated that Gosse " had a practical grasp of the importance of conservation, far ahead of his time.

" Although there had been attempts to construct what had previously been called an " aquatic vivarium " ( a name Gosse found " awkward and uncouth "), Gosse published The Aquarium in 1854 and set off a mid-Victorian craze for household aquariums.

In 1856 Gosse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which, because he had no university position or inherited wealth, gave him " a standing he otherwise lacked.

A few months before Gosse was honored, his wife discovered that she had breast cancer.

In what Stephen Jay Gould has called " glorious purple prose ," Gosse argued that if one assumed creation ex nihilo, there would necessarily be traces of previous existence that had never actually occurred.

" Omphalos " is Greek for " navel ", and Gosse argued that the first man, Adam, did not require a navel because he was never born ; nevertheless he must have had one, as do all complete human beings, just as God must have created trees with rings that they never grew.

Thus, Gosse argued that the fossil record — even coprolites — might also be evidence of life that had never actually existed but which may have been instantly formed by God at the moment of creation.

According to Edmund Gosse, his father's career was destroyed by his " strange act of wilfulness " in publishing Omphalos ; Edmund claimed his father had " closed the doors upon himself forever.

By this time Gosse and his son had moved permanently from London to St Marychurch, Devon.

Meanwhile, the ever active Gosse had taken up the study of orchids and exchanged a number of letters on the subject with Darwin, though he never published on it himself.

Gosse had prayed regularly that he might not taste death but meet Christ in the air at his Second Coming, and he was bitterly disappointed when he realized that he would die like everyone else.

Gosse proposed that just as Adam had a navel ( omphalos is Greek for navel ), evidence of a gestation he never experienced, so also the Earth was created ex nihilo complete with evidence of a prehistoric past that never actually occurred.

Gosse had sworn to bring down the Black Freighter captained by the man who killed his wife.

The Gosse had very high swashbuckling, and as a result they were very good at boardings, and to some extent, damage absorption.

The reasoning parallels the reasoning that Gosse chose to explain why Adam ( who would have had no mother ) had a navel: Though Adam would have had no need of a navel, God gave him one anyway to give him the appearance of having a human ancestry.

Gosse had attended meetings at the Royal Society where evolutionary theory was tested by Darwin before the publication of Origin — and had even made similar observations himself about variation of species in his own studies into marine biology — and considered Darwin's reasoning scientifically sound.

Giles supposedly discovered Uluru ( formerly Ayers Rock ), but was beaten to the claim by a competing explorer, William Gosse.

In 1963 another species of Pterophyllum were discovered, P. leopoldi, this species was described by Gosse.

The Omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that in order for the world to be " functional ", God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels ( omphalos is Greek for " navel "), and that therefore no evidence that we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable.

Many young Earth creationists distinguish their own hypotheses from the " Omphalos hypothesis ", today more commonly referred to as the apparent age concept, put forth by the naturalist and science writer Philip Henry Gosse.

In old age he befriended the young Edmund Gosse, whom he introduced to Shakespeare.

Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by Philip Gosse, written in 1857 ( two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species ), in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is.

Gosse was also the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation.

Gosse was played by Alan Badel and portrayed more sympathetically than in Edmund Gosse's book.

In the 1870s there was a revival of interest in French forms, led by Andrew Lang, Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, John Payne, and others.

Edmund Gosse, influenced by Théodore de Banville, was the first English writer to praise the villanelle and bring it into fashion with his 1877 essay " A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse ".

Some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time, such as Edmund Gosse, J.

Edmund Gosse, by John Singer Sargent, 1886

After Eliza Elder Brightwen's death, Edmund Gosse arranged for the publication of her two posthumous works Last Hours with Nature ( 1908 ) and Eliza Brightwen, the Life and Thoughts of a Naturalist ( 1909 ), both edited by W. H. Chesson, and the latter book with an introduction and epilogue by Gosse.

* Works by Edmund Gosse at Internet Archive

Taylor's work was much admired by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, for its devotional quality ; and by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, and Edmund Gosse for its literary qualities.

A selection of his plays was edited ( 1888 ) for the " Mermaid " series, with an introduction by Edmund Gosse.

An article in the Cornhill Magazine by Edmund Gosse, " A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse ," appearing in July 1877, simultaneously with Dobson's second volume, Proverbs in Porcelain, drew the general eye to the possibilities and achievements of the movement.

First, he published the critically acclaimed Mon frère Yves ( My Brother Yves ), a novel describing the life of a French naval officer ( Pierre Loti ), and a Breton sailor ( Yves Kermadec ), described by Edmund Gosse as " one of his most characteristic productions ".

Collected reviews of Loti's works, by literary critic Edmund Gosse.

Painted by Nicolas Gosse, c. 1900

Gosse was also closely tied to figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, and André Gide.

" I have known writers of every degree, but never one to whom the act of composition was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater ," wrote Edmund Gosse, who also described Pater's method of composition: " So conscious was he of the modifications and additions which would supervene that he always wrote on ruled paper, leaving each alternate line blank.

He was made secretary of the Poets ' Club, attended by such establishment figures as Edmund Gosse and Henry Newbolt.

In 1857, two years before the publication of Charles Darwin's, Origin of Species, Gosse published Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot and thereby created what has been called the Omphalos hypothesis.

* Edmund Gosse, Father and Son ( New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907 ); Oxford World Classics edition, 2004.

William Allingham – Henry C. Beeching – Oliver Madox Brown – Olive Custance – John Davidson – Austin Dobson – Lord Alfred Douglas – Evelyn Douglas – Edward Dowden – Ernest Dowson – Michael Field – Norman Gale – Edmund Gosse – John Gray – William Ernest Henley – Gerard Manley Hopkins – Herbert P. Horne – Lionel Johnson – Andrew Lang – Eugene Lee-Hamilton – Maurice Hewlett – Edward Cracroft Lefroy – Arran and Isla Leigh – Amy Levy – John William Mackail – Digby Mackworth Dolben – Fiona MacLeod – Frank T. Marzials – Théophile Julius Henry Marzials – George Meredith – Alice Meynell – Cosmo Monkhouse – George Moore – William Morris – Frederick W. H. Myers – Roden Noël – John Payne – Victor Plarr – A. Mary F. Robinson – William Caldwell Roscoe – Christina Rossetti – Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Algernon Charles Swinburne – John Addington Symonds – Arthur Symons – Rachel Annand Taylor – Francis Thompson – John Todhunter – Herbert Trench – John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley – Rosamund Marriott Watson – Theodore Watts-Dunton – Oscar Wilde – Margaret L. Woods – Theodore Wratislaw – W. B. Yeats

Gosse started his career as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1867 alongside the songwriter Theo Marzials, a post which Charles Kingsley helped his father obtain for him.

Edmund Gosse called the play " perhaps the best existing English comedy of intrigue ", while Charles Lamb wrote that " This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley ," but criticized " sentimental incompatibilities " even while admitting that " the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant.

He also translated, alone or in collaboration, other productions of the Scandinavian stage: Ibsen's A Doll's House ( 1889 ), The Master Builder ( 1893, with Edmund Gosse ); Edvard Brandes's A Visit ( 1892 ); Ibsen's Peer Gynt ( 1892, with Charles Archer ); Little Eyolf ( 1895 ); and John Gabriel Borkman ( 1897 ); and he edited Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas vols., 1890 – 1891 ).

Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and a friend of Gosse, was asked to review Gosse's book.