Philip Henry Gosse

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.

Early life

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.

Philip Henry

Philip Henry (24 August 1631 – 24 June 1696) was an English Nonconformist clergyman and diarist.

Early life

Philip Henry was the eldest son of John Henry, keeper of the orchard at Whitehall, London. His father, son of Henry Williams, was Welsh, born at Briton Ferry, Glamorganshire, on 10 July 1590, and took his father's Christian name as his surname; he rose to be page of the backstairs (a senior personal attendant) to James, Duke of York, and was buried at St. Margaret's, Westminster, on 2 March 1652. His mother, Magdalen, daughter of Henry Rochdale, was baptised at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields on 19 October 1599, and died on 6 March 1645.