Does the rain have a father?(Science)

"MY FATHER was a zoologist and a writer of books on natural history," states Edmund Gosse in the first chapter of the book--published exactly a hundred years ago--that tells the story of his relationship with his father. That hardly says the half of it: his father was the lighthouse keeper who went out in a gale of immanence to try to rescue his religion, though it wasn't the storm clouds which threatened his flail skiff so much as the great heave of history beneath it. While rowing frantically into the gale he couldn't help but notice a whorled pedunculate barnacle (Cirripides) stuck to the underside of the boat. It may even have been the barnacle which had caused the gale in the first place.

Edmund Gosse was an Edwardian worthy when he wrote his book, a figure of influence in a nexus that included Henry James, his lifelong friend Thomas Hardy, and somewhat later Andre Gide; it was Gosse who rediscovered Donne (his encouragement led Grierson to produce his great edition of Donne's poetry in 1912); it was Gosse who championed his close friend Robert Louis Stevenson whose last letter, written to him from Samoa two days before he died, read "I was not born for age ..."; and it was Gosse who, having first taught himself the Scandinavian languages, made Ibsen's name famous outside Norway.

A librarian for most of his working life, first at the British Museum and more notoriously as a finical custodian of the library of the House of Lords (1904-14), Gosse's waning years were his glory days: his appointment as chief reviewer for the Sunday Times in London allowed him to make and break reputations on the literary stock market. But the First World War had cut the heart out of his bellettrism (Critical Kitkats, Silhouettes, Books on the Table, More Books on the Table), and later events reversed his harrumphing opinion of the modernists (Ezra Pound: "that preposterous American filibuster and Provencal charlatan"): his memoir is the only rib to jut out from the rump of a massive literary carcase.

Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments was ostensibly written in that spirit of filial piety so characteristic of those leisured, somewhat dithering Edwardian sons whose fathers worked tirelessly to pink the globe. It is, in fact, a work often held up as a specimen of symptomatic writing, a case of a son honouring the biblical injunction in the spirit while betraying it in the letter. Gosse at first published his book anonymously; but anonymity in the wake of a celebrated father was hardly an effective cover.

Gosse had already written a biography of his father, a formal one: Father and Son is quite a different book. All too aware of the aversion of the Victorian sensibility to the individual over-stridently asserting his worth in the face of the greater social good, Gosse animadverts: he is offering the reader another hagiography of "the unique and noble figure of my father". Not quite. What seems a relatively tame desire on the part of the son to state his differences with his father pulls away more than just the carpet from the elder Gosse's genuflecting. He unseats the weight of oppressive paternal will, and a small boy discovers, against the odds, that he has a "self' too--a part of him that is irreducible, privy to no one and, above all, impervious to his father's glad tidings.

What is remarkable in all this is that his father was one of the most popular descriptive naturalists of the Victorian mid-century. As a young man of slender means and no great education (he left school at fifteen), Philip Henry Gosse went from Poole in Dorset to the small settlement of Carbonear, on the east coast of Newfoundland, there to work for a fishing company as an indentured clerk. In 1832, he purchased a book on microscopy and built his own microscope. Much of his twenties and early thirties were spent farming and teaching in Lower Canada and Alabama, but his most notable and final sojourn abroad was on "the lovely island" of Jamaica, where he developed his abilities as an entomologist and omithologist; he came back to England with a huge collection of plants, shells, fish and mammalia in 1846.

He went on to publish, under the aegis of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, scores of papers and popular books on zoology and botany, especially on marine invertebrates. A Textbook of Zoology for Schools (1851), once distributed in the thousands, is now a collectors' item. A century after their publication his two large illustrated guides to the zoology and ornithology of Jamaica remain the prime sources of information on the island's natural history. Some of his most original work was devoted to the infusoria, the minute protozoa found in drops of water. He coined the word aquarium and helped design the first working ...