Philip Henry Gosse FRS (; 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". Early life Philip Henry Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810, second of four children of Thomas Gosse (1765-1844), a mezzotint engraver and itinerant painter of miniature portraits, and Hannah (née Best), a lady's maid before her marriage. He spent his childhood mostly in Poole, Dorset, where his aunt, Susan Bell, taught him to draw and introduced him to zoology. She had similarly taught her own son, Thomas Bell, who was twenty years older and later became a great friend to Gosse. At fifteen he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole. In 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co. There he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island.While living in Carbonear, he wrote and illustrated an "exquisite" volume, never published, the "Entomologia Terra Novae". In 1832 Gosse experienced a religious conversion and, as he described it, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God." In 1835 he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada (Quebec), where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years. He originally tried to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. The experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that