Philip Henry Gosse was not your average Victorian clerical amateur natural historian. For one thing, after having experimented with religious communal living in Canada, and with Wesleyan Methodism, he finally settled with the Plymouth Brethren, an eccentric dissenting sect who emphasised the Second Coming of Christ.
As a natural historian, he is best remembered for one of the most infamous intellectual failures of the nineteenth century. In his "Omphalos", Gosse attempted to marry the Biblical account of the age of the Earth with the evidence of contemporary geological research which suggested that the world must be many times older. The Omphalos Theory ("Omphalos" is Greek for "navel"), Gosse argued that just as the first man Adam would have been made by God with a belly button, although he had no need for one, equally God would have created the rock strata complete with fossils. His ideas met with critical scorn and sold poorly. Two years later in 1859, Darwin published "The Origin of Species" and "Omphalos" was quickly forgotten.
Nevertheless his reputation seemed not to have suffered overmuch: by 1861 he published "The Romance of Natural History" which became a best-seller. Having failed to impress his intellectual peers with "Ompholos", he enjoyed vastly more success as a populariser for the less discerning reading public.
Some of what Gosse termed "Romantic zoology" consists of what would now be termed cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, specifically those considered mythological by mainstream zoology: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and so on. In his section on "The Marvellous" Gosse reports on frog-falls and tree-dwelling fish, and the Contents page lists such interesting headlines as "Blood Showers Traced to Butterfly Discharges", "Mermaids in Shetland" and the "Hybernation [sic] of Swallows" (Gosse believed that a minority of swallows, in accordance with ancient popular belief, probably did hibernate during the winter: he was wrong).
His approach is summed up in the Preface:
THERE are more ways than one of studying natural history. There is Dr Dryasdust's way ; which consists of mere accuracy of definition and differentiation ; statistics as harsh and dry as the skins and bones in the museum where it is studied. There is the field-observer's way ; the careful and conscientious accumulation and record of facts bearing on the life-history of the creatures ; statistics as fresh and bright as the forest or meadow where they are gathered in the dewy morning. And there is the poet's way; who looks at nature through a glass peculiarly his own ; the aesthetic aspect, which deals, not with statistics, but with the emotions of the human mind, surprise, wonder, terror, revulsion, admiration, love, desire, and so forth, which are made energetic by the contemplation of the creatures around him.
In my many years' wanderings through the wide field of natural history, I have always felt towards it something of a poet's heart, though destitute of a poet's genius. As Wordsworth so beautifully says,
" To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
Now, this book is an attempt to present natural history in this aesthetic fashion. Not that I have presumed constantly to indicate like the stage-directions in a play, or the " hear, hear ! " in a speech the actual emotion to be elicited ; this would have been obtrusive and impertinent ; but I have sought to paint a series of pictures, the reflections of scenes and aspects in nature, which in my own mind awaken poetic interest, leaving them to do their proper work.
"The Romance of Natural History: Second Series" By Philip Henry Gosse is currently for sale by Oxfam Books and Music Moseley at eBay: http://bit.ly/98ABUk, for the price of £50 (or make us an offer)
