Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Gosse was a naturalist of growing renown. He had already published countless articles and more than twenty books (recently at the rate of four per year) on natural history, most of them about the seashore and coastal sea creatures. His self-illustrated book, A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853) was a smash best-seller.

  Gosse’s Rambles was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Victorians to the seaside and started a craze for collecting shells and small sea creatures. As the pursuit and study of natural history developed into a nationwide obsession, Gosse’s influence grew so great that it was reported that England had been “Gosse-ified.” He was the David Attenborough of his time. His son Edmund Gosse, in his biography of his father, wrote of an incident on the rocky coast near Torbay, Devon, when Gosse, out fossicking, came upon a group of ladies who believed they had found a rare species of sea creature. Curious, but without identifying himself, Gosse asked if he might see their prize. When they showed it to him, he politely disagreed and told them it was something else, much more common. The ladies were indignant and informed him he was mistaken. “Gosse is our authority,” they told him witheringly.

  Gosse was the inventor of the aquarium. As a boy he had tried keeping sea anemones in a jug of seawater, but it had become cloudy and malodorous and the anemones died. He had since spent years gazing into coastal rock pools, sometimes by night with a candle or lantern. He learned that “animals absorb oxygen, and exhale or throw off carbonic acid gas; plants, on the contrary, absorb carbonic acid, and throw off oxygen.” He made experiments to see how long he could keep captive sea creatures and plants together in artificial, glass-walled tanks. In 1854, he published The Aquarium (a term Gosse coined). It contained beautiful, expensively reproduced illustrations and plans for making “a marine aquarium for the Parlour or Conservatory.” It was also about Gosse’s further rambles along the seashore. It was rapturously reviewed.

  Those who have had the gratification of spirit-companionship with Mr Gosse in his former rambles, will rejoice to find themselves again by his side…. He has the art of throwing the “purple light” of life over the marble form of science…this volume ought to be upon the table of every intelligent sea-side visitor. (Globe, June 22, 1854)

  He had become Jacques Cousteau as well. The book was another best-seller, and very financially rewarding for Gosse. No author could ask for more.

  Reviewers did not remark on the religious passages in The Aquarium. Gosse framed many of his natural observations as proof of the existence of God, of his “wondrous contrivance in planning” and the “stable order of the universe.” Such sentiments were shared by the vast majority of Gosse’s readers and reviewers and were a natural complement of the fulsome prose style of the Victorian era.

  Darwin and Gosse were well aware of each other. They keenly admired each other’s work and corresponded frequently. Both were members of the Royal Society. They finally met at the Linnean Society in March 1855, where Gosse was reading a paper on sea anemones. Darwin was so enamored of Gosse’s experiments with aquariums that he toyed with the idea of making one for himself.

  Gosse knew little or nothing of Darwin’s preoccupation with species, but he too had read Wallace’s deduction in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in Space and Time with a Pre-existing closely allied Species.” He had read Lyell, of course, as had most naturalists, amateur and professional, but the breadth and depth of Gosse’s reading in geology was uncommon. He had explored the subject with a highly personal interest, and he had become disturbed by its inferential trend toward a belief in the natural, if not yet precisely described and identified, evolution of species.

  Gosse and FitzRoy would have known each other as well, and met a number of times, for the same reasons: they were fellows of the same societies, frequenters of the same small scientific circles that included Lyell and Darwin—and in these, because of his reclusiveness, it was Darwin who was the odd man out. Until Gosse moved permanently to Devon in 1857, both he and FitzRoy lived in London and were highly active in intellectual affairs, regularly attending meetings, readings, gatherings at their societies and clubs, mixing and exchanging ideas with their peers. Both read widely and exhaustively on scientific matters, particularly in geology and the marine sciences. FitzRoy would have been well aware of Gosse’s rising star, but his own had suffered a twenty-year-long downward trajectory, and when they met there was no reason for anyone to remark or remember such occasions.

  The two men shared something else. Gosse was a fanatic, fundamentalist Christian. To him, God and nature were inseparable: “I cannot look at the Bible with one eye, and at Nature with the other. I must take them together,” he wrote. He was a lay preacher to fellow fundamentalists who called themselves the Plymouth Brethren. He lived his life in the everyday expectation of the imminent second coming of Christ.

  As marriage to Mary O’Brien had deepened FitzRoy’s faith, Gosse was equally affected by the more fervent beliefs of his wife. Emily Gosse was a widely read writer of religious tracts. They had first met at an assembly of the Brethren, and their son, Edmund Gosse, wrote about the rigour of their religious faith in his book Father and Son.

  She [Emily] had formed a definite conception of the absolute, unmodified and historical veracity, in its direct and obvious sense, of every statement contained within the covers of the Bible. For her, and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of the Scripture…. When they read [in the Book of Revelation] of seals broken and vials poured forth, of the star which was called Wormwood that fell from Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of women and their teeth as the teeth of lions, they did not admit for a moment that these vivid mental pictures were of a poetic character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in guarded language, describing events which were to happen.

  Gosse and his wife shared an intensely tender, loving, and physically intimate relationship. When Edmund was an infant and Gosse was off rambling at the seaside for his work while Emily stayed at home with the baby, they exchanged daily letters that were full of their longing for each other. “O my sweet beloved one, my helper, my comforter, my joy, my love,” Gosse wrote Emily, “I wish I could just now throw my arms round your neck and kiss your dear mouth.” And he signed his letters, “Ever your own faithful, affectionate, devoted, longing lover and husband, P.H. Gosse.”

  And Emily wrote back:

  My love, How lonely you must feel tonight…I am always thinking of you…I long for tomorrow when I shall have a letter from you. Do not forget me for a moment and let me hear your assurance that you love me as I love you. I do not like to go to bed. I shall be so lonely. I miss having you to pray with me and to kiss me.

  Perhaps because they married late (for the times)—Philip at age thirty-eight, and Emily, who was three and a half years older than he was, at forty-two—they were amazed and profoundly grateful for what they had found in each other. This only deepened when Emily gave birth at forty-three to their son. They couldn’t believe what they had been given so late in life. “How very happy we are!” Emily wrote and said often. “Surely this cannot last!”

  And it did not. In 1856, when they had been married eight years, Emily found a hard lump in her breast. After ten months of excruciating treatment, she was dead.

  Philip’s grief was fathomless. But he was not inconsolable: he knew for certain where Emily had gone. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” He knew too that one day he would join Emily again, and as if to obliterate any doubt about this, he turned toward God as never before.

  He wrote a slim book, A Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse. Emily’s religious writing had reached a wide audience, so there was more than catharsis to this endeavor.

  Then he began writing something else. Faith was under assault by the findings of geology, and, w
ith a sense of divine mission, Gosse set out to use his knowledge of natural history, his deep erudition, and his reputation to crush such heresy for good. The resulting book was titled Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. (Omphalos is the Greek word for navel.)

  It could have been written by FitzRoy. Gosse’s arguments and “proofs” were strikingly like those juggling geology and Holy Writ in the last two chapters of FitzRoy’s Beagle narrative. Both used an identical technique: Scientific facts, displaying an impressive depth of knowledge, were marshaled and explained with the same appealing common-or-garden logic that had the Flood compared to a coat of varnish.

  Gosse posed the eternal riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The embryo or the cow? Neither, he answered. All of organic nature consists of an endless circular process: Chicken to egg to chicken, seed to tree to seed, rain to ocean to cloud to rain, baby to man to baby.

  This, then, is the order of all organic nature. When once we are in any portion of the course, we find oursleves running in a circular groove, as endless as the course of a blind horse in a mill. It is evident that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which is a legitimate beginning of existence….

  Creation, however, solves the dilemma…. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature. But what is creation? It is the sudden bursting into a circle…. The life history of every organism commenced at some point or other of its circular course.

  But once in the circle of life, a nanosecond after creation, the very nature of the first egg showed an apparent history of its cyclical self stretching into the past.

  Its whole structure displays a series of developments…former conditions…. But what former conditions?…[Its] history was a perfect blank till the moment of creation. The past conditions or stages of existence can…be…inferred by legitimate deduction from the present…; they are identically the same in every respect, except in this one, that they were unreal.

  Those past “unreal” stages of the development of an organism that could be seen immediately after the instant of its creation, Gosse called prochronic. They appeared real, they could be readily inferred from an examination of the present nature of the organism. See this cow? Obviously it must once have been a calf. We “irresistibly” look backward in our belief of the existence of these prochronic stages, but they are illusory. They didn’t exist before the moment of creation, the “sovereign act of power, an irruption into the circle.”

  Man, too, the very first one, came equipped with seemingly irresistible proof of existence stretching backward into uncountable time.

  What means this curious depression in the centre of the abdomen, and the corrugated knob which occupies the cavity? This is the NAVEL. The corrugation is the cicatrice left where once was attached the umbilical cord…. And thus the life of the individual Man before us passes, by a necessary retrogression, back to the life of another individual, from whose substance his own substance was formed.

  Both Gosse and FitzRoy believed that man was created fully grown: “That man could have been first created in an infant, appears to my apprehension impossible,” FitzRoy had written, “because—if an infant—who nursed, who fed, who protected him till able to subsist alone?”

  Gosse agreed with this. When God created an organism, it hit the ground running, with an apparent history of its development, in the middle of an endless, ongoing cycle following the laws of nature and its own structure. Gosse’s Adam was a man of “between 25 and 35 years” of age.

  So it was with the fish and the fowl, and all the flora and fauna of the earth—the first towering redwood tree was created with its rings that gave an appearance of 500 years of history—so it was with the earth itself, the geological examination of which had revealed, like the rings inside a tree, the fossils embedded in its crust. In the world according to Gosse, all of nature was created with such “retrospective phenomena.”

  There was a freaky logic that came with all this. By the principles of Gosse’s retrospective widget, the law of prochronism, the world might have popped into existence as a going concern at any recent moment, without anyone even suspecting it.

  Let us suppose that this present year 1857 had been the particular epoch in the projected life-history of the world, which the Creator selected as the era of its actual beginning. At his fiat it appears; but in what condition? Its actual condition at this moment: whatever is now existent would appear, precisely as it does appear. There would be cities filled with swarms of men; there would be houses half-built; castles fallen into ruins; pictures on artists’ easels just sketched in; wardrobes filled with half-worn garments; ships sailing over the sea; marks of birds’ footsteps in the mud; skeletons whitening the desert sands; human bodies in every stage of decay in the burial grounds…. These phenomena…are inseparable from the condition of the world at the selected moment of irruption into its history; because they constitute its condition; they make it what it is.

  Creation might have happened five minutes ago, and all memory would be prochronic phenomena. Creation might really be a palimpsest upon a fake creation.

  Gosse’s theory appeared, for those who bought it, to reconcile the great paradox of the age: geology and the mosaic account of creation. But it made geology moot. If it was an illusion, what was the point? Gosse offered hope.

  The acceptance of the principles [of prochronism]…would not, in the least degree, affect the study of scientific geology. The character and order of the strata; their disruptions and displacements and injections; the successive floras and faunas; and all the other phenomena, would be facts still. They would still be, as now, legitimate subjects of examination and inquiry. I do not know that a single conclusion, now accepted, would need to be given up, except that of actual chronology. And even in respect of this, it would be rather a modification than a relinquishment of what is at present held; we might still speak of the inconceivably long duration of the processes in question, provided we understand ideal instead of actual time; that the duration was projected in the mind of God, and not really existent.

  In other words, all of scientific investigation was pointless, but still fun.

  When it appeared in the fall of 1857, Omphalos, a new book from a best-selling author, was widely noticed and reviewed. The word most consistently applied to it was “ingenious”: “The argument is startling. But it is so ingeniously framed…. This very ingenious analogy…. We cannot deny the merit of ingenuity.” “His reasonings are very ingenious.” “Mr. Gosse’s argument appears to us both ingenious and important.”

  FitzRoy must have been one of its most receptive readers. Here was an esteemed author grounded, as he had been, in scientific learning, using that knowledge to reconcile, as he had tried to do, science with scripture.

  Gosse wrote for FitzRoy.

  But the overwhelming response to his ingenuity was scathing. Reviewers found the logic in the book “unanswerable,” untestable, the theory “too monstrous for belief.” The Natural History Review pronounced it full of “idle speculations, fit only to please a philosopher in his hours of relaxation, but hardly worthy of the serious attention of any earnest man, whether scientific or not.”

  Even believers were unhappy with Gosse’s argument. In the Review’s April issue, a man with the Dickensian name of J. Beete Jukes, denounced his flippant handling of the “awe-inspiring mystery” of creation.

  To a man of a really serious and religious turn of mind this treatment is far more repulsive than that even of…the Lamarckian School. Both classes of reasons appeal to our ignorance rather than our knowledge, and take upon themselves to make positive assertions upon things about which no man knows, perhaps no man ever shall or can know, anything whatever; but the soi-disant religious school to which Mr Gosse belongs has the additional bad taste to speak as if they, forsooth, were on the most intimate terms with the Creator.

  Mr. Jukes was deploring the same presumption
FitzRoy brought to his own scientifically buttressed logic and arguments about the Flood; the presumption of a man to explain God and his designs.

  Gosse was dismayed.

  In the course of that dismal winter [wrote his son Edmund], as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those “thousands of thinking persons,” which he had rashly assured himself of receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere…a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups…. He had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant favourite of the press, and now…he could not recover from the amazement at having offended everybody by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of universal reconciliation.

  He was most stung by the reaction of his old friend, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, author of Westward Ho! and The Water Babies, who had befriended and championed Gosse and his work before his books were well-known. Omphalos had “staggered and puzzled me,” he wrote him. Kingsley also believed absolutely in divine creation, but Gosse’s book was the first to make him actually doubt it.

  Your book tends to prove this—that if we accept the fact of absolute Creation, God becomes a Deus quidam deceptor…. I cannot believe this of a God of truth, of Him who is Light and no darkness at all, of Him who formed the intellectual man after His own image, that he might understand and glory in His Father’s works…. I cannot give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years’ study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind….

  I would not for a thousand pounds put your book into my children’s hands.