276 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



title of Life in its Lower, Intermediate ; and Higher Forms, 

 and was startled on the day of publication by seeing it 

 ticketed in the bookshops " Gosse's Life," as though some 

 one had obliged the town with a premature biography of 

 him. These essays were slight, and the religious element 

 was quite unduly prominent, as if vague forebodings of the 

 coming theory of evolution had determined the writer to 

 insist with peculiar intensity on the need of rejecting all 

 views inconsistent with the notion of a creative design. 

 This book entirely failed to please the public, who had now 

 for so many years been such faithful clients to him ; with 

 the scientific class it passed almost unnoticed. 



No such gentle oblivion attended the other unlucky 

 venture of the year 1857. My attempt in writing this life 

 has been to present a faithful picture of my father's career, 

 and I dare not omit to chronicle the disappointments and 

 annoyances which attended the publication of his Omphalos: 

 An A ttempt to untie the Geological Knot. Philip Gosse was 

 so profoundly unambitious, so entirely careless of what was 

 thought about his doings and writings, that he can hardly 

 be said to have made a mistake, in the ordinary sense of 

 the phrase, in composing a book which was fatal to the 

 advance of his reputation as a man of science. But others, 

 to whom his fame is dearer than it was to himself, may 

 bitterly regret that he left his own field of research, that 

 field in which he was gathering such thick and clustering 

 laurels, to adventure in a province of scientific philosophy 

 which lay outside his sphere, and for which he was fitted 

 neither by training, nor by native aptitude, nor by the 

 possession of a mind clear from prejudice. Thoroughly 

 sincere as he was, and devoted to truth as he believed 

 himself to be, he lacked that deeper modesty, that nobler 

 candour, which inspired the genius of Darwin. The current 

 interpretation of the Bible lay upon his judgment with a 



