[2] Gosse was also the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation.

Gosse also studied and drew the local flora and fauna, assembling an unpublished volume, Entomologia Alabamensis, on insect life in the state.

[14] Returning to England in 1839, Gosse was hard pressed to make a living, subsisting on eightpence a day ("one herring eaten as slowly as possible, and a little bread").

"[6] Gosse opened a "Classical and Commercial School for Young Gentlemen" while keeping detailed records of his microscopic investigations of pond life, especially cyclopidae and rotifera.

These dissenters emphasized the Second Coming while rejecting liturgy and an ordained ministry—although they otherwise endorsed the traditional doctrines of Christianity as represented by the creeds of the Methodist and the Anglican Church.

[18] In 1843, Gosse gave up the school to write An Introduction to Zoology for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and to draw some of the illustrations.

[25] Back in England, Gosse wrote books both in his field and out; a quick volume he produced for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was Monuments of Ancient Egypt, a land he had never visited and never would.

[26] As his financial situation stabilized, Gosse courted Emily Bowes, a forty-one-year-old member of the Brethren, who was both a strong personality and a gifted writer of evangelical tracts.

)[30] As L. C. Croft has written, "Much of Gosse's success was due to the fact that he was essentially a field naturalist who was able to impart to his readers something of the thrill of studying living animals at first hand rather than the dead disjointed ones of the museum shelf.

Rather than undergo surgery (a risky procedure in 1856), the Gosses decided to submit to the ointments of an American doctor, Jesse Weldon Fell, who if not a charlatan, was certainly on the fringe of contemporary medical practice.

In what Stephen Jay Gould has called "gloriously purple prose",[41] Gosse argued that if one assumed creation ex nihilo, there would necessarily be traces of previous existence that had never actually occurred.

Even his friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, wrote that he had read "no other book which so staggered and puzzled" him, that he could not believe that God had "written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind.

[50] His son said that his father "soon lost confidence in the Plymouth Brethren also, and for the last thirty years of his life he was really unconnected with any Christian body whatsoever.

The Literary Gazette said that Gosse now stood "alone and unrivalled in the extremely difficult art of drawing objects of zoology so as to satisfy the requirements of science" as well as providing "vivid aesthetic impressions".

[52] In 1860 he met and married Eliza Brightwen (1813–1900), a kindly, tolerant Quaker who shared Gosse's intense interest in both natural history and the well-being of his son.

[55] The Gosses lived simply, invested some of their income and gave more away to charity, especially to foreign missionaries, including ones sent to the "Popish, priest-ridden Irish".

But Gosse sponsored the publication of Edmund's early poetry, which gave the younger man entrée to new friends of literary importance, and the two men "came out of the years of conflict with their relationship wary but intact.

[59] His penultimate enthusiasm was with the genitalia of butterflies, about which he published a paper in the Transactions of the Linnean Society[60] But before his death he returned to rotifera, with much of his research appearing in a two-volume study written with another zoologist, Charles Thomas Hudson.

[61] His wife recalled that Gosse's final illness may have been caused by his becoming chilled while trying to adjust his telescope at an open window on a winter night.

[62] Gosse had prayed regularly that he might not taste death but meet Christ in the air at his Second Coming, and he was bitterly disappointed when he realized that he would die like everyone else.

[65] A modern editor of Father and Son has rejected this portrait of Philip Henry Gosse, on the grounds that his own "writings reveal a genuinely sweet character.

[69] Nearly a century after Gosse's death, a study based on his published remarks and writings about his father concluded that in varying degrees, they are "riddled with error, distortion, contradictions, unwarranted claims, misrepresentation, abuse of the written record, and unfamiliarity with the subject.

Ann Lingard's novel Seaside Pleasures (2014) explores the relationship between Gosse and his wife Emily from the point of view of a female student in his shore-class.