226 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



although industry and thrift were still necessary to insure 

 anything like comfort. 



A labour which belongs to the year 1850, and which 

 must not be left unrecorded in the chronicle of his career, 

 was his investigations into the genus of Rotifera called by 

 Ehrenberg Notommata. The German savant had left 

 Notommata in an unwieldy and heterogenous condition ; 

 Philip Gosse now directed his particular attention to it, 

 and in a succession of papers, read before his two societies, 

 he reduced it to well-defined proportions. These, and 

 his monograph, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural 

 History, on the new genus Asplanchna, which he dis- 

 covered in 1850 in the Serpentine, attracted a great deal 

 of attention from specialists, and opened up a long series 

 of similar contributions to exact knowledge. During the 

 latter part of the autumn he was once again in daily 

 attendance at the Natural History Departments of the 

 British Museum. On October 10 he was fortunate enough 

 to be leaving the central hall at the very moment when 

 the winged bull from Nineveh was being brought in. 

 Thirty years later my father met, for the first time, with 

 Dante Gabriel Rossetti's striking poem, The Burden of 

 Nineveh, recording the same experience : — 



" Sighing, I turned at last to win 

 Once more the London dirt and din ; 

 And as I made the swing-door spin 

 And issued, they were hoisting in 



A winged beast from Nineveh." 



It was interesting, and it greatly interested Philip Gosse 

 to think, that in the little crowd that watched the bull-god 

 enter his last temple, he had unconsciously stood shoulder 

 to shoulder with the brilliant young poet, those two, 

 perhaps alone among the spectators, sharing the acute 

 sense of mystery and wonder at the apparition. 



