Despite the claustrophobic environment, Edmund experiences brief moments of joy when his father allows him to view the exotic flora and fauna he keeps in his aquarium as part of his studies.
Confiding in his father about these terrible dreams, he reveals that his recent prayers have been to ask God for a toy sailing boat he has seen for sale in the window of a village shop.
Darwin is about to publish his seminal work and, aware of Gosse's reputation in the field of natural science, asks for his support in the face of a potential outcry against the Royal Society.
Despite his conviction that the story of Genesis is literally true, the encounter leads Gosse into questioning his faith; his own studies into marine biology demonstrate that species are not immutable, yet he is troubled at the thought that this challenges the validity of Creation given in the bible.
They hurry back to the house as Gosse is expecting an important visitor that afternoon, Charles Kingsley, with whom he wishes to discuss a book he intends to write reconciling the biblical story with Darwin's findings.
Gosse reasons that if Adam was intended to be the model of humanity he would have a navel despite having no mother; if this is the case then Genesis is merely a "cutting in" to Creation, and God has specifically designed every life form upon the earth, including man himself, to appear as though a continuing cycle of change and adaptation has taken place.
The play concludes with a voice-over taken from Mr Brackley's earlier meeting with Gosse: Any creature, any life form that can, by however small a degree, adapt to the harshness of its environment is the one that is going to persist.
The fit survive, the unfit perish.As with Potter's 1971 serial about the life of Giacomo Casanova, Where Adam Stood is a loose adaptation of original source material set within a fictional framework.
The BBC's decision not to broadcast Brimstone effectively ended this idea, although Potter would continue to refer to the three as a connected trilogy in interviews and critical essays.
[1] This sequence, which does not feature in Gosse's original book, is one of many that ties into the central theme of Edmund reclaiming himself from his father, who acts as the mouthpiece for an omniscient and unseen God.
The nearest parallel to the story of the sailing boat is Gosse's description of his childhood prayer to have a "humming top", for which his parents told him it was inappropriate to pray.
[2] Edmund's description of his father's studies towards the publication of Omphalos place it in the context of the debates about Charles Lyell's geology, which emphasised that the earth was millions of years old, and recent work by various naturalists including Thomas Vernon Wollaston, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Alfred Russel Wallace.
This incident derives from the following passage in Father and Son: In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a whisper.
It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great mover of men, that before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain body-guard of sound and experienced naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be privately made aware of its tenour.
[3] Sedgwick was an old earth creationist who believed that God had miraculously created and then caused the extinction of separate immutable species in sequence over millions of years as a sign of his power.
She is also referred to in Cream in My Coffee (1980), when the curmudgeonly Bernard Wilsher (played by Lionel Jeffries) reminisces about a 'Mrs Teague' who used to live in his village; describing her as a "mad old woman with a cat".