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.

Philip Henry Gosse ( 6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888 ) was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology.

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

After his death, Gosse was portrayed as a despotic father of uncompromising religious views in Father and Son ( 1907 ), the literary masterpiece of his son, poet and critic Edmund Gosse.

Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810 of an itinerant painter of miniature portraits and a lady's maid.

Returning to England in 1839, Gosse was hard pressed to make a living, subsisting on eightpence a day (" one herring eaten as slowly as possible, and a little bread ").

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.

) As his financial situation stabilized, Gosse courted Emily Bowes, a forty-one-year-old member of the Brethren, who was both a strong personality and a gifted writer of evangelical tracts.

Gosse's only son was born on 21 September 1849, an event Gosse noted in his diary with the words, " E. delivered of a son.

The book was financially profitable for Gosse, and " the reviews were full of praise " even though Gosse used natural science to point to the necessity of salvation through the blood of Christ.

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.

" 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.

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 was " very comfortably off " with the earnings from his books and dividends from his investments, and in 1864 Eliza received a substantial legacy which allowed Gosse to retire from his career as a professional writer and live in " congenial obscurity.

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.

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 ".

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

Roger Allam played Gosse and Derek Jacobi, Edmund.

Gosse believed that he had discovered a theory that might neatly resolve the seeming contradiction in the age of the earth between the evidence of God's Word and the evidence of His creation as expounded by such contemporary geologists as Charles Lyell.

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.

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.

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.

Painted by Nicolas Gosse, c. 1900

The book was the inspiration for Dennis Potter's 1976 television drama Where Adam Stood, starring Alan Badel as Philip Gosse.

Suffering from headaches, perhaps the result of overwork, Gosse and his family began to spend more time away from London on the Devon coast.

" In fact, during the next three years Gosse published more than thirty scientific papers and four books.

This meant that no more crew and Gosse specific cards would appear in the game.

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.

Philip Henry Gosse and Edmund Gosse, 1857.

After his father's death, Edmund Gosse published a typical Victorian biography, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse ( 1890 ).

Nevertheless, after reading the latter, the writer George Moore suggested to Edmund that it contained " the germ of a great book ," which Edmund Gosse first published anonymously as Father and Son in 1907.

* Edmund Gosse, Naturalist of the Sea Shore, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1890

* 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

French commissions dried up and he told his friend Edmund Gosse in 1885 that he contemplated giving up painting for music or business.

Sir Edmund William Gosse CB ( 21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928 ) was an English poet, author and critic ; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.