complete human beings, just as God must have created trees with rings that they never grew. Thus, Gosse argued that the fossil record—even coprolites—might also be evidence of life that had never actually existed but which may have been instantly formed by God at the moment of creation. The general response was "as the Westminster Review put it, that Gosse's theory was "too monstrous for belief.'" Even his friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, wrote that he had read "no other book which so staggered and puzzled" him, that he could not believe that God had "written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind." Journalists later sniggered that God had apparently hidden fossils in the rocks to tempt geologists to infidelity. Omphalos sold poorly and was eventually rebound with a new title, Creation, "in case the obscure one had had an effect on sales." The problem was not with the title. In 1869 most of the edition was sold as waste paper. Later career According to Edmund Gosse, his father's career was destroyed by his "strange act of wilfulness" in publishing Omphalos; Edmund claimed his father had "closed the doors upon himself forever." But, during the next three years Gosse published more than thirty scientific papers and four books. By this time Gosse and his son had moved permanently from London to St Marychurch, Devon. (Gosse refused to use the "St" and even gave his address as Torquay so as not to have anything to do with the "so-called Church of England".) He soon became the pastor and overseer of the Brethren meeting. It was first held in a loft over a stable but shortly, under Gosse's preaching and peacemaking, in finer quarters—which he perhaps financed himself. His son said "he soon lost confidence in the Plymouth Brethren also, and for the last thirty years of his life he was really unconnected with any Christian body whatsoever." During this period, Gosse made a special study of sea anemones (Actiniae) and in 1860 published Actinologia Britannica. Reviewers especially praised the colour lithographs made from Gosse's watercolours. The Literary Gazette said that Gosse now stood "alone and unrivalled in the extremely difficult art of drawing objects of zoology so as to satisfy the requirements of science" as well as providing "vivid aesthetic impressions". In 1860 he met and married Eliza Brightwen (1813–1900), a kindly, tolerant Quaker who shared Gosse's