Magazine’ for 1826 he made his début in publication. Any attempt to write for the public, however, was nipped in the bud by circumstances which removed him in the early part of 1827 to a whaler's office in the little town of Carbonear in Newfoundland, where he remained, save for a few months spent in the remote station of St. Mary's in the same colony, until 1835. These eight years of seclusion, however, were of great value to him. His office work was not arduous, and it was at Carbonear that he learned to be a naturalist. He has himself [remarked?]: ‘In 1832 I commenced that serious and decisive devotion to scientific natural history which has given the bent to my whole life.’ In May of that year he bought, at an auction in Harbour Grace, Adams's ‘Essays on the Microscope,’ and instantly turned his attention to microscopy, especially as regarded the insects of Newfoundland, of which very little was then known. In 1835 he left Newfoundland and bought a farm at Compton in Canada, which he was glad to sell again in 1838, having during these three years barely extracted from it a subsistence. In 1838, however, while at Compton, he wrote his first work, ‘The Entomology of Newfoundland,’ which still remains unpublished, and he made innumerable observations and drawings of Canadian fauna and flora. In March 1838 he made his way south to Philadelphia, where he met with encouragement from Professor Nuttal, and was courteously received by the Academy of Natural Sciences. He made no long stay there, however, but proceeded onward to Alabama, where in the remote township of Dallas, far up the country, he acted as a village schoolmaster for nine months. Early in 1839 he returned from Mobile to Liverpool, and on the voyage wrote his ‘Canadian Naturalist.’ After a period of great anxiety and even destitution he succeeded in selling this manuscript for a good sum. The ‘Canadian Naturalist’ was published early in 1840, and was well received. Gosse did not, however, even now take to the literacy profession. He opened a small school in the suburbs of London, and lived precariously in this way until 1843, when he wrote and successfully sold his second book, the ‘Introduction to Zoology.’ Now, at the age of thirty-three, he first attracted the notice of the scientific world, and was recommended by the authorities of the British Museum to undertake the collecting of undescribed birds and insects in the tropics. Accordingly, in October 1844 he sailed for the island of Jamaica, and, after a short stay at Kingston, he took up his abode at Bluefields, a pastoral estate in the neighbourhoud of Savannah-la-Mar, which became his home for the next eighteen months. During this period he was actively engaged in procuring and sending home specimens of rare animals of every description. At length, in July 1846, he quitted Jamaica, returning to England, which country he never left again. Early in 1847 he published the ‘Birds of Jamaica,’ accompanied in 1849 by a folio volume of splendid plates. In 1848 he married Miss Emily Bowes [see Gosse, Emily], and in 1849 his son and only child, Edmund, was born. At this time Gosse was occupied with a great deal of minor and miscellaneous literary work, residing all the while in London. In 1851 appeared one of the most valuable and best written of his books, ‘A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica,’ in the preparation of which he was assisted by the gifted West Indian naturalist, Mr. Richard Hill of Spanish Town. In 1852 Gosse compiled a volume on ‘The Antiquities of Assyria,’ and he undertook many other tasks for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
He was now, however, about to turn his attention to that branch of zoology by which he is mainly known, namely the marine invertebrates. In January 1852 he went to reside at St. Marychurch, South Devonshire; nervous dyspepsia from excess of brain work making a country retirement absolutely imperative. Gosse, however, could never be unemployed, and he instantly occupied himself with the zoophytes of the rocky shore of that village; the climate, however, proved not bracing enough, and before the summer set in the family moved to Ilfracombe, where they continued till the end of the year. The result of these excursions appeared in 1853, as ‘A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast;’ in the appendix of which the invention of a marine aquarium, which had occupied Gosse since the beginning of 1852, was first given to the public; and the fact stated that the writer had successfully preserved marine animals alive in captivity for eleven months, a feat till then supposed to be impossible. This notion proved extremely popular, and in 1854 Gosse issued one of the most acceptable of his books, ‘The Aquarium,’ illustrated as usual by five coloured plates. Amateurs complained, however, that they knew not how to identify and name their marine captures, no handbook of our maritime fauna existing. To meet this want, Gosse issued (1855-6) the two volumes of his ‘Manual of Marine Zoology,’ embellished by nearly seven hundred illustrations drawn on wood by the author. Gosse's contributions to science were now too considerable to be overlooked, and in 1856 he was elected an F.R.S.; he had already become a very fre-
