Monday 6 April 2015

This crazy englishman who went picking bugs, coined the word aquarium & invented seawater aquarium!!!!


Philip Henry Gosse (6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry, was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. The aquarium craze was launched in early Victorian 
At fifteen he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole, and in 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co., where he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island. England by Gosse who 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.
In 1835 he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years, originally in an attempt to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. Nevertheless, the experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that crazy Englishman who goes about picking up bugs." During this time he became a member of the Natural History Society of Montreal and submitted specimens to its museum.
In October 1844 Gosse sailed to Jamaica, where he served as a professional collector for the churlish dealer Hugh Cuming. Although Gosse worked hard during 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." With no racial prejudice, he easily hired black youths as his assistants, and his Jamaican books are full of praise for one of them, Samuel Campbell.