Evenings at the Microscope; Or, Researches Among the Minuter Organs and Forms of Animal Life

by Philip Henry Gosse

This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program.

496 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 2005

About the author

Philip Henry Gosse FRS (/ɡɒs/; 6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry, was an English naturalist and populariser of natural science, an early improver of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse 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. His work was the catalyst for an aquarium craze in early Victorian England.

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 an overbearing father of uncompromising religious views in Father and Son (1907), a memoir written by his son, Edmund Gosse, a poet and critic, though the son's description of Gosse has since been described as having included "error, distortion...unwarranted claims, misrepresentation" and "abuse of the written record".

Reviews

[Temnospondyli · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is impossible for a book having been written so long ago not to suffer from some distortions of time. There are many instances within this text that the modern reader might struggle to grasp the meaning behind descriptions written in an unfamiliar scientific language with the occaisional archaic word thrown in. Microscopy, too, has moved on and evolved and the modern reader may find themselves searching online for images that will aid in understanding of 19th century scientific equipment (microscopy-uk is a good place to start). Despite this, Evenings at the Microscope is a joy to read and sent me running back to my own microscope to observe (when possible) the same or similar specimens as those about which I was reading. Full of fantastic drawings support the text
to flesh out the organisms caught in Gosse's compressorium, although several on the longer passages could have been better supported with a few more, especially for those like myself who, living far from the coasts of any country, are quite unfamiliar with sealife, British or otherwise. Still, the book is entertaining, inspiring, charmingly oldfashioned, and deserves to be more widely read. If there is one thing that I find to be a true drawback, it is the occaisional genuflections. However, Gosse was a lay preacher and this being written at a time when scientific inquiry was still in its pre-Darwinian infancy (The Origin of Species being published the same year) and thus science and religion had not
yet withdrawn back behind their intellectual and ideological redoubts, it is something I can overlook. Anyone with an interest in the history of science, biology, and microscopy would do well to seek out this book and spend a few evenings of their own with the text alongside their own microscope.