Philip Henry Gosse

Philip Henry Gosse
Philip Henry Gosse, 1855
Born	6 April 1810 (1810-04-06) Worcester, Worcestershire, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Died	23 August 1888 (1888-08-24) (aged 78) Torquay, Torbay, England
Nationality	English
Fields	Naturalist
Known for	Marine biology, aquarium pioneer

Philip Henry Gosse (6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry, was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. The aquarium craze was launched in early Victorian England by Gosse who created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo in 1853, and coined the term "aquarium" when he published the first manual, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, in 1854.

Gosse was also the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation. After his death, Gosse was portrayed as a despotic father of uncompromising religious views in Father and Son (1907), a memoir written by his son, the poet and critic Edmund Gosse.

Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810 of an itinerant painter of miniature portraits and a lady's maid. He spent his childhood mostly in Poole, Dorset, where his aunt, Susan Bell, taught him to draw and introduced him to zoology as she had her own son, Thomas Bell, twenty years older and later to be a great friend to Henry.

At fifteen he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole, and in 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co., where he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island. In 1832 Gosse experienced a religious conversion—as he said, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God."