224 ^^-^ ^^^^ ^^ PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



attendant. This was a much-needed refreshment and 

 stimulus in his monotonous life. He was, meanwhile, 

 making very rapid progress in his investigation of the 

 Rotifera, a class at that time, and for many years after- 

 wards, but little understood or studied. In 1849 the one 

 published authority on these creatures, the book which — 

 as Hudson and Gosse have put it in their great monograph 

 — " swallowed up, as it were, the very memory of its pre- 

 decessors," was the Die Infusionsthierchen published at 

 Leipsic by Ehrenberg, in 1838. Philip Gosse found it 

 impossible to proceed without knowing what Ehrenberg 

 had said, but unfortunately the Prussian savant wrote only 

 in German, a language with which the English naturalist 

 was not acquainted. Emily Gosse, however, knew German 

 enough, and during the winter of 1849-50 he borrowed 

 the precious volume from the council of the Microscopical 

 Society, and they turned Ehrenberg into English between 

 them, Gosse's feverish anxiety to know what Ehrenberg 

 was saying acting on his language-sense, for the moment, 

 like a sort of clairvoyance. It was long his intention to 

 publish this translation of Ehrenberg, which his wife and 

 he soon completed, with illustrative notes and additions of 

 his own, but he did not find any opportunity of doing this, 

 and the version remains inedited. 



It becomes necessary, however, to write when — 



" A life your arms unfold 

 Whose crying is a cry for gold," 



and with the opening of 1850 Philip Gosse so arranged his 

 days that the book-making should occupy the mornings, 

 and the afternoons and evenings only be given to the 

 microscope. The Handbook of Zoology was finished on 

 February 4, and the very next day Sacred Streams, a 

 volume describing the natural history and the antiquities 



