his eighteen months on the island, he later called this period his " 'holiday' in Jamaica." Gosse's study specialized in birds, and Gosse has been called "the father of Jamaican ornithology". Gosse hired black youths as assistants and especially praised one of them, Samuel Campbell, in his Jamaican books. For Christian companionship he enjoyed the company of Moravian missionaries and their black converts, and he preached regularly to the Moravian congregation. On his return to London in 1846, Gosse wrote a trilogy on the natural history of Jamaica including A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica (1851). It is described as "written in a congenial style and firmly established his reputation both as a naturalist and a writer." In the field of herpetology, Gosse described several new species of reptiles endemic to Jamaica. Popular nature writer 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. 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. They married in November 1848, and their union was an extremely happy one. As D. J. Taylor has written, "the word 'uxorious' seems to have minted to define" Gosse. Gosse's only son was born on 21 September 1849. Gosse noted the event in his diary with the words, "E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica"—an amusing conjunction which Edmund later described as demonstrating only the order of events: the boy had arrived first. Gosse wrote a succession of books and articles on natural history, some of which were (in his own words) "pot-boilers" for religious publications. (At the time, accounts of God's creation were considered appropriate Sabbath reading for children.) 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. In addition to this he was a skilled scientific draughtsman who was able to illustrate his books himself." Suffering from headaches, perhaps the result of overwork, Gosse, with his family, began to spend more time