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Christian Carl August Gosch (1832-1913)

Political and scientific writer, MA zoology 1855.

C.C.A. Gosch left Denmark in 1859 and moved to England where he earned his living as a political and historical writer until his death. As a wholehearted nationalist, he advocated the Danish case in the British press during the war with Prussia in 1864. In the 1870s, he engaged in the Darwinian debates in Denmark with his comprehensive three-volume study of the history of zoology in Denmark, Udsigt over Danmarks zoologiske Literatur [Outline of the Zoological Literature of Denmark] (Copenhagen: Hoffenberg, Jespersen & Fr. Traps Etabl., 1870-78). Gosch took a clear antievolutionary stance and thoroughly criticised the scientific status of Darwinism, which he regarded as mere guesswork. Gosch was solidly placed in the traditions of idealist natural history and transcendental morphology, which he conceived as perfectly adapted to explain the observations made in nature. Gosch’s idealist critique of the theory of species transmutation can be regarded as a philosophically informed outline of the scientific basis of pre-Darwinian zoology in Denmark.   

Hans Henrik Hjermitslev

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