Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/266

Gosse  contributor to the ‘Transactions’ of the society. In 1856, in the volume called ‘Teoby,’ he gave a detailed account of a summer spent in scientific investigation of the fauna of a Welsh watering-place and its neighbourhood. The problem of evolution was now beginning to agitate public opinion, though as yet not widely accepted; and Gosse attempted, in two rather unfortunate volumes, ‘Life’ (1857) and ‘Omphalos’ (1857), to meet the difficulties of animal development in a conservative spirit. He was disturbed during this year by the death of his wife, to whom he was most tenderly attached, and whose intellectual sympathy had become a necessity to him. These last volumes were not warmly received, either by savants or the public, and Gosse left London in great depression, never to return to town for more than a few days at a time. He took up his abode in St. Marychurch again, where he bought a house in which he lived for more than thirty years.

After a few months he recovered his mental activity, and turning from speculation to the true bent of his genius, independent observation of animals, he slowly wrote what is considered the most important of all his contributions to knowledge, the elaborate work on the sea-anemones, entitled ‘Actinologia Britannica,’ 1858-60, which is likely long to remain the standard authority on the subject. It is profusely illustrated, and contains a coloured representation of every British species at that time identified. His ‘Letters from Alabama,’ written more than twenty years before, had appeared in 1859. In 1860, moreover, was published ‘The Romance of Natural History,’ an attempt to ‘present natural history in æsthetic fashion.’ This is the one of Gosse's works which has been most frequently reprinted; it contains his famous theory of the sea-serpent as a surviving plesiosaurus. A second series followed in 1862. In 1860 Gosse married again, his second wife being Miss Eliza Brightwen of Saffron Walden, who survives him. In 1861 he published ‘A Year at the Shore,’ and in 1865 ‘Land and Sea.’ With these volumes his professional career as an author closed, and he devoted himself for the future in private to the cultivation of orchids, of which he formed a remarkable collection, and at intervals to the microscopic study of the rotifera, a section of British zoology till then almost wholly neglected. As late as 1885 he returned to scientific literature and published an elaborate and abstruse monograph on ‘The Prehensile Armature of the Papilionidæ,’ with microscopic plates drawn by himself in his seventy fifth and sixth years. About this time he placed his drawings and scattered papers regarding the rotifera, the labour of twenty years, in the hands of Dr. C. T. Hudson, who helped him to embody them in 1886 in a handsome work in two volumes. Gosse's eyesight remained remarkably good, and his general health gave no anxiety to his family until within a short time of his decease. In the winter of 1887, however, while using his telescope on a bitterly cold night, he was attacked by bronchitis, which he threw off in the spring of 1888, but too late. The weak condition in which he found himself rapidly developed a latent cardiac disease, under which he suffered for about six months; he passed away in the seventy-ninth year of his age, at his house in St. Marychurch, on 23 Aug. 1888. He was throughout his life an earnest student of Holy Scripture, and a believer in the doctrines which are known as evangelical.

Gosse published the following volumes, which are not mentioned in the foregoing survey: He contributed in all about sixty-two separate papers to the ‘Transactions’ of the Royal Society, the earliest being ‘Notes on an Electric Centipede,’ 1843. Of these papers most are quite short, but the following, all as it happens dealing with the rotifera, are large pamphlets or small volumes:
 * 1) ‘The Monuments of Ancient Egypt,’ 1847.
 * 2) ‘Natural History: Mammalia,’ 1848.
 * 3) ‘Natural History: Birds,’ 1849.
 * 4) ‘Popular Ornithology of Britain,’ 1849.
 * 5) ‘Natural History: Reptiles,’ 1850.
 * 6) ‘Sacred Streams,’ 1850.
 * 7) ‘The History of the Jews from the Christian Era to the Dawn of the Reformation,’ 1851.
 * 8) ‘Natural History: Fishes,’ 1851.
 * 9) ‘A Text Book of Zoology for Schools,’ 1851.
 * 10) ‘The Ocean,’ a book which has been frequently reprinted.
 * 11) ‘Natural History: Molluscs,’ 1854.
 * 12) ‘A Handbook to the Marine Aquarium,’ 1855.
 * 13) ‘Wanderings through Kew,’ 1857.
 * 14) ‘Memoir of Emily Gosse,’ 1857.
 * 15) ‘Evenings at the Microscope,’ 1859.
 * 16) ‘The Great Atlas Moth of Asia’ (Atticus Atlas), 1879.
 * 17) ‘The Mysteries of God,’ 1887.
 * 1) ‘On the Structure, Functions, and Homology of the Manducatory Organs in the Class Rotifera,’ 1854.
 * 2) ‘On the Dioecious Character of the Rotifera,’ 1856.
 * 3) ‘On Stephanoceros,’ 1862.
 * 4) ‘On Floscularia,’ 1862.
 * 5) ‘On the Melicertidæ,’ 1862.

 GOSSELIN, THOMAS LE MARCHANT (1765–1857), admiral, second son of Colonel Joshua Gosselin of the militia, entered the navy in 1778 on board the Actæon with 