Omphalos (book)

The book was precised by his son Edmund Gosse: :Life is a circle, no one stage of which more than any other affords a natural commencing-point. Every living object has an omphalos, or an egg, or a seed, which points irresistibly to the existence of a previous living object of the same kind. Creation, therefore, must mean the sudden bursting into the circle, and its phenomena, produced full grown by the arbitrary will of God, would certainly present the stigmata of a pre-existent existence. Each created tree would display the marks of sloughed bark and fallen leaves, though it had never borne those leaves or that bark. The teeth of each brute would be worn away with exercise which it had never taken. By innumerable examples he shows that this must have been the case with all living forms. If so, then why may not the fossils themselves be part of this breaking into the circle? Why may not the strata, with their buried fauna and flora, belong to the general scheme of the prochronic development of the plan of the life-history of this globe? ==Reception==

The book was widely rejected at the time, sold few copies, and had almost no supporters. Although the publisher used in advertising an extract from the Natural History Review: "We have no hesitation in pronouncing this book to be the most important and best-written that has yet appeared on the very interesting question with which it deals. We believe the logic of the book to be unanswerable, its laws fully deduced", the rest of the sentence in the review reads "and the whole, considered as a play of metaphysical subtlety, absolutely complete; and yet we venture to predict that its conclusions will not be accepted as probable by one in ten thousand readers." The reviewer concluded that Omphalos contained "idle speculations, fit only to please a philosopher in his hours of relaxation, but hardly worthy of the serious attention of any man, whether scientific or not". The geologist Joseph Beete Jukes was more scathing in a later issue: "To a man of a really serious and religious turn of mind, this treatment is far more repulsive than that even of the author of Vestiges of Creation and the Lamarckian School". The Rev. Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and a friend of Gosse, was asked to review Gosse's book. Refusing, he wrote to Gosse: For a long time, apart from the discussion in his biography of his father, the only widely read though oblique references to the book were to be found in Father and Son, the psychological portrait of Philip Gosse by his son Edmund Gosse published in 1907. He wrote: Martin Gardner, in his 1952 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, observed: "Not the least of its remarkable virtues is that although it won not a single convert, it presented a theory so logically perfect, and so in accord with geological facts that no amount of scientific evidence will ever be able to refute it ... Not a single truth of geology need be abandoned, yet the harmony with Genesis is complete". This internal consistency was also discussed by the American biologist Stephen Jay Gould in a 1987 article entitled "Adam's Navel", which has since been republished as a mini book. He comments: It had earlier been referred to in a short work by Jorge Luis Borges. had captured the essence of his argument 30 years previously. The theory presented in the book is now called the Omphalos hypothesis: that the world and everything in it could have been created at any time, even mere moments ago, with even our own memories being false indications of its age. This is a largely philosophical position, not a scientific one. ==References==