Gosse's "Omphalos" online

Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.

Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.

Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:

My Father had never admired Sir Charles Lyell. I think that the famous 'Lord Chancellor manner' of the geologist intimidated him, and we undervalue the intelligence of those whose conversation puts us at a disadvantage. For Darwin and Hooker, on the other hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know not whether this had anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impetuous experiment in reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of zoology or botany. Lyell had been threatening to publish a book on the geological history of Man, which was to be a bombshell flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, after long reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify geology to godly readers of 'Genesis'. It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.

The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this--that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the circular course of nature could be conceived only on the supposition that the object created bore false witness to past processes, which had never taken place. For instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created full-grown yesterday. He would certainly--though Sir Thomas Browne denied it--display an 'omphalos', yet no umbilical cord had ever attached him to a mother.

Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My Father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This 'Omphalos' of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb. It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the early chapters of 'Genesis'. Nobody was to blame for that. My Father, and my Father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma; he alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of geological mystery. He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away

Gosse fils is being a bit harsh. It is true that the book was not well received, but it is well grounded in the best naturalist knowledge of the day (and some of the engravings are marvellous works of the period), and it is not stupidly done. However, the theory of knowledge it involves is that, in effect, the world might have been created at any time, including five minutes ago, and that only revelation can break out of this skepticism. It is in effect a complete denial of the foundations of doing science at all. His basic argument is that all things operate in cycles - lifecycles or geological cycles, and so if things had to be created at any point, they would need to break into these cycles, and continue them as if they had already been going on for a complete round.

Moreover, I discovered that people thought from the son's work that the title of the book was Omphalos, when it is in fact Creation (Omphalos). I had the curious experience of trying to convince a Wiki editor that it was in fact so called, while staring at the physical book, as he tried to convince me that the bibliographical databases were correct!

I was sent this book at a cost of $US500, by the generosity of Dr Noelie Alito, of Texas. Apparently she finds that her cats do not take all that much of her income. I am greatly in her debt. I will have the book rebound and placed in a university library for all to see. This scan is, and the final one on Archive.Org will be, under a Creative Commons License allowing copying and free distribution, but not modification.

Late note: A nice summary of Edmund Gosse is here.