[Illustration: Engraved by J. Sartain.—From a original Talbotype.
Gould & Lincoln, Boston]
THE
FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR:
OR,
THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS.
BY
HUGH MILLER,
AUTHOR OF “THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,” ETC.
“When I asked him how this earth could have been repeopled if
ever it had undergone the same fate it was threatened with by
the comet of 1680, he answered,—‘that required the power of a
Creator.’”—_Conduit’s “Conversation with Sir Isaac Newton”._
FROM THE THIRD LONDON EDITION.
WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR
BY LOUIS AGASSIZ.
BOSTON:
GOULD AND LINCOLN.
69 WASHINGTON STREET.
NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY.
CINCINNATI: GEO. S. BLANCHARD.
1868.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by
GOULD, KENDALL AND LINCOLN,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District of
Massachusetts.
TO SIR PHILIP DE MALPAS GREY EGERTON, BART. M.P., F.R.S. & G.S.
To you, Sir, as our highest British authority on fossil fishes, I take
the liberty of dedicating this little volume. In tracing the history of
Creation, as illustrated in that ichthyic division of the vertebrata
which is at once the most ancient and the most extensively preserved, I
have introduced a considerable amount of fact and observation, for the
general integrity of which my appeal must lie, not to the writings of my
friends the geologists, but to the strangely significant record inscribed
in the rocks, which it is their highest merit justly to interpret and
faithfully to transcribe. The ingenious and popular author whose views
on Creation I attempt controverting, virtually carries his appeal from
science to the want of it. I would fain adopt an opposite course: And
my use, on this occasion, of your name, may serve to evince the desire
which I entertain that the collation of my transcripts of hitherto
uncopied portions of the geologic history with the history itself,
should be in the hands of men qualified, by original vigor of faculty
and the patient research of years, either to detect the erroneous or to
certify the true. Further, I feel peculiar pleasure in availing myself
of the opportunity furnished me, by the publication of this little work,
of giving expression to my sincere respect for one who, occupying a
high place in society, and deriving his descent from names illustrious
in history, has wisely taken up the true position of birth and rank in
an enlightened country and age; and who, in asserting, by his modest,
persevering labors, his proper standing in the scientific world, has
rendered himself first among his countrymen in an interesting department
of Natural Science, to which there is no aristocratic or “royal road.”
I have the honor to be, Sir,
With admiration and respect,
Your obedient humble servant,
HUGH MILLER.
TO THE READER.
There are chapters in this little volume which will, I am afraid, be
deemed too prolix by the general reader, and which yet the geologist
would like less were there any portion of them away. They refer chiefly
to organisms not hitherto figured nor described, and must owe their
modicum of value to that very minuteness of detail which, by critics of
the merely literary type, unacquainted with fossils, and not greatly
interested in them, may be regarded as a formidable defect, suited
to overlay the general subject of the work. Perhaps the best mode of
compromising the matter may be to intimate, as if by beacon, at the
outset, the more repulsive chapters; somewhat in the way that the
servants of the Humane Society indicate to the skater who frequents in
winter the lakes in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, those parts of the
ice on which he might be in danger of losing himself. I would recommend,
then, readers not particularly palæontological, to pass but lightly over
the whole of my fourth and fifth chapters, with the latter half of the
third, marking, however, as they skim the pages, the conclusions at which
I arrive regarding the bulk and organization of the extraordinary animal
described, and the data on which these are founded. My book, like an
Irish landscape dotted with green bogs, has its portions on which it may
be perilous for the unpractised surveyor to make any considerable stand,
but across which he may safely take his sights and lay down his angles.
It will, I trust, be found, that in dealing with errors which, in at
least their primary bearing, affect questions of science, I have not
offended against the courtesies of scientific controversy. True, they
are errors which also involve moral consequences. There is a species
of superstition which inclines men to take on trust whatever assumes
the name of science; and which seems to be a reaction on the old
superstition, that had faith in witches, but none in Sir Isaac Newton,
and believed in ghosts, but failed to credit the Gregorian calendar. And,
owing mainly to the wide diffusion of this credulous spirit of the modern
type, as little disposed to examine what it receives as its ancient
unreasoning predecessor, the development doctrines are doing much harm on
both sides of the Atlantic, especially among intelligent mechanics, and
a class of young men engaged in the subordinate departments of trade and
the law. And the harm, thus considerable in amount, must be necessarily
more than merely considerable in degree. For it invariably happens,
that when persons in these walks become materialists, they become also
turbulent subjects and bad men. That belief in the existence after death,
which forms the distinguishing _instinct_ of humanity, is too essential
a part of man’s moral constitution not to be missed when away; and so,
when once fairly eradicated, the life and conduct rarely fail to betray
its absence. But I have not, from any consideration of the mischief thus
effected, written as if arguments, like cannon-balls, could be rendered
more formidable than in the cool state by being made red-hot. I have
not even felt, in discussing the question, as if I had a man before me
as an opponent; for though my work contains numerous references to the
author of the “Vestiges,” I have invariably thought on these occasions,
not of the anonymous writer of the volume, of whom I know nothing, but
simply of an ingenious, well-written book, unfortunate in its facts and
not always very happy in its reasonings. Further, I do not think that
palæontological fact, in its bearing on the points at issue, is of such
a doubtful complexion as to leave the geologist, however much from moral
considerations in earnest in the matter, any very serious excuse for
losing his temper.
In my reference to the three great divisions of the geologic scale, I
designate as _Palæozoic_ all the fossiliferous rocks, from the first
appearance of organic existence down to the close of the Permian system;
all as _Secondary_, from the close of the Permian system down to the
close of the Cretaceous deposits; and all as _Tertiary_, from the close
of the Cretaceous deposits down to the introduction of man. The wood-cuts
of the volume, of which at least nine tenths of the whole represent
objects never figured before, were drawn and cut by Mr. John Adams of
Edinburgh, (8, Heriot Place,) with a degree of care and skill which has
left me no reason to regret my distance from the London artists and
engravers. So far at least as the objects could be adequately represented
on wood, and in the limited space at Mr. Adams’ command, their truth
is such that I can safely recommend them to the palæontologist. In
the accompanying descriptions, and in my statements of geologic fact
in general, it will, I hope, be seen that I have not exaggerated the
peculiar features on which I have founded, nor rendered truth partial in
order to make it serve a purpose. Where I have reasoned and inferred,
the reader will of course be able to judge for himself whether the
argument be sound or the deduction just; and to weigh, where I have
merely speculated, the probability of the speculation; but as, in at
least _some_ of my statements of fact, he might lie more at my mercy, I
have striven in every instance to make these adequately representative of
the actualities to which they refer. And so, if it be ultimately found
that on some occasions I have misled others, it will, I hope, be also
seen to be only in cases in which I have been mistaken myself. The first
or popular title of my work, “Foot-prints of the Creator,” I owe to Dr.
Hetherington, the well-known historian of the Church of Scotland. My
other various obligations to my friends, literary and scientific, the
reader will find acknowledged in the body of the volume, as the occasion
occurs of availing myself of either the information communicated, or the
organism, recent or extinct, lent me or given.
HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF “OLD RED SANDSTONE” AND “FOOTPRINTS OF THE
CREATOR.”
The geological works of Hugh Miller have excited the greatest interest,
not only among scientific men, but also among general readers. There is
in them a freshness of conception, a power of argumentation, a depth
of thought, a purity of feelings, rarely met with in works of that
character, which are well calculated to call forth sympathy, and to
increase the popularity of a science which has already done so much to
expand our views of the Plan of Creation. The scientific illustrations
published by Mr. Miller are most happily combined with considerations of
a higher order, rendering both equally acceptable to the thinking reader.
But what is in a great degree peculiar to our author, is the successful
combination of Christian doctrines with pure scientific truths. On that
account, his works deserve peculiar attention. His generalizations have
nothing of the vagueness which too often characterize the writings
of those authors who have attempted to make the results of science
subservient to the cause of religion. Struck with the beauty of Mr.
Miller’s works, it has for some time past been my wish to see them more
extensively circulated in this country; and I have obtained leave from
the author to publish an American edition of his “Footprints of the
Creator,” for which he has most liberally furnished the publishers with
the admirable wood-cuts of the original.
While preparing some additional chapters, and various notes illustrative
of certain points alluded to incidentally in this work, it was deemed
advisable to preface it with a short biographical notice of the author.
I had already sketched such a paper, when I became acquainted with a full
memoir of this remarkable man, containing most interesting details of
his earlier life, written by that eminent historian of the “Martyrs of
Science,” the great natural philosopher of Scotland. It has occurred to
me that, owing to the frequent references which I could not avoid to my
own researches, I had better substitute this ample Biography for my short
sketch, with such alterations and additions as the connection in which
it is brought here would require. I therefore proceed to introduce our
author with Sir David Brewster’s own words:—
Of all the studies which relate to the material universe, there is none,
perhaps, which appeals so powerfully to our senses, or which comes
into such close and immediate contact with our wants and enjoyments,
as that of Geology. In our hourly walks, whether on business or for
pleasure, we tread with heedless step upon the apparently uninteresting
objects which it embraces: but could we rightly interrogate the rounded
pebble at our feet, it would read us an exciting chapter on the history
of primeval times, and would tell us of the convulsions by which it
was wrenched from its parent rock, and of the floods by which it was
abraded and transported to its present humble locality. In our visit to
the picturesque and the sublime in nature, we are brought into closer
proximity to the more interesting phenomena of geology. In the precipices
which protect our rock-girt shores, which flank our mountain glens, or
which variegate our lowland valleys, and in the shapeless fragments at
their base, which the lichen colors, and round which the ivy twines, we
see the remnants of uplifted and shattered beds, which once reposed in
peace at the bottom of the ocean. Nor does the rounded boulder, which
would have defied the lapidary’s wheel of the Giant Age, give forth a
less oracular response from its grave of clay, or from its lair of sand.
Floated by ice from some Alpine summit, or hurried along in torrents of
mud, and floods of water, it may have traversed a quarter of the globe,
amid the crash of falling forests, and the death shrieks of the noble
animals which they sheltered. The mountain range, too, with its catacombs
below, along which the earthquake transmits its terrific sounds, reminds
us of the mighty power by which it was upheaved;—while the lofty peak,
with its cap of ice, or its nostrils of fire, places in our view the
tremendous agencies which have been at work beneath us.
But it is not merely amid the powers of external nature that the once
hidden things of the Earth are presented to our view. Our temples and
our palaces are formed from the rocks of a primeval age; bearing the
very ripple-marks of a Pre-Adamite ocean,—grooved by the passage of the
once moving boulder, and embosoming the relics of ancient life, and the
plants by which it was sustained. Our dwellings, too, are ornamented with
the variegated limestones,—the indurated tombs of molluscous life,—and
our apartments heated with the carbon of primeval forests, and lighted
with the gaseous element which it confines. The obelisk of granite,
and the colossal bronze which transmit to future ages the deeds of the
hero and the sage, are equally the production of the Earth’s prolific
womb; and from the green bed of the ocean has been raised the pure and
spotless marble, to mould the divine lineaments of beauty, and perpetuate
the expressions of intellectual power. From a remoter age, and a still
greater depth, the primary and secondary rocks have yielded a rich
tribute to the chaplet of rank, and to the processes of art.
Exhibiting, as it peculiarly does, almost all those objects of interest
and research, Scotland has been diligently studied both by native
and foreign observers; and she has sent into the geological field a
distinguished group of inquirers, who have performed a noble feat in
exploring the general structure of the Earth, in decyphering its ancient
monuments, and in unlocking those storehouses of mineral wealth, from
which civilized man derives the elements of that gigantic power which his
otherwise feeble arm wields over nature.
The occurrence of shells on the highest mountains, and the remains of
plants and animals, which the most superficial observer could not fail
to notice, in the rocks around him, have for centuries commanded the
attention and exercised the ingenuity of every student of nature. But
though sparks of geological truth were from time to time elicited by
speculative minds, it was not till the end of the last century that
its great lights broke forth, and that it took the form and character
of one of the noblest of the sciences. Without undervaluing the labors
of Werner, and other illustrious foreigners, or those of our southern
countrymen, Mitchell and Smith, at the close of the last century, we
may characterize the commencement of the present as the brightest
period of geological discovery, and place its most active locality in
the northern metropolis of our island. It was doubtless from the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, as a centre, that a great geological impulse was
propagated southward, and it was by the collision of the Wernerian and
Huttonian views, the antagonist theories of water and of fire, that men
of intellectual power were summoned from other studies; and that grand
truths, which fanaticism and intolerance had hitherto abjured, rose
triumphant over the ignorance and bigotry of the age. The Geological
Society of London, which doubtless sprung from the excitement in the
Scottish metropolis, entered on the new field of research with a
faltering step. The prejudices of the English mind had been marshalled
with illiberal violence against the Huttonian doctrines. Infidelity and
Atheism were charged against their supporters; and had there been a
Protestant Inquisition in England at that period of general political
excitement, the geologists of the north would have been immured in its
deepest dungeons.
Truth, however, marched apace; and though her simple but majestic
procession be often solemn and slow, and her votaries few and dejected,
yet on this, as on every occasion, she triumphed over the most inveterate
prepossessions, and finally took up her abode in those very halls and
institutions where she had been persecuted and reviled. When their
science had been thus acquitted of the charge of impiety and irreligion,
the members of the Geological Society left their humble and timid
position of being the collectors only of _the materials of future
generalizations_, and became at once the most successful observers of
geological phenomena, and the boldest asserters of geological truth.
In this field of research, in which the physical, as well as the
intellectual, frame of the philosopher is made tributary to science, two
of our countrymen—Sir Roderick Murchison and Sir Charles Lyell—have been
among our most active laborers. From the study of their native glens,
these distinguished travellers, like the Humboldts and the Von Buchs of
the continent, have passed into foreign lands, exploring the north and
the south of Europe, and extending their labors to the eastern ranges of
the Ural and the Timan, and to the Apallachians and the Alleghanies in
the far west. But while our two countrymen were interrogating the strata
of other lands, many able and active laborers had been at work in their
own.
Among the eminent students of the structure of the earth, Mr. Hugh
Miller holds a lofty place, not merely from the discovery of new and
undescribed organisms in the Old Red Sandstone, but from the accuracy and
beauty of his descriptions, the purity and elegance of his composition,
and the high tone of philosophy and religion which distinguishes all
his writings. Mr. Miller is one of the few individuals in the history
of Scottish science who have raised themselves above the labors of an
humble profession, by the force of their genius and the excellence of
their character, to a comparatively high place in the social scale.
Mr. Telford, like Mr. Miller, followed the profession of a stone-mason,
before his industry and self-tuition qualified him for the higher
functions of an architect and an engineer. And Mr. Watt and Mr. Rennie
rose to wealth and fame without the aid of a university education. But,
distinguished as these individuals were, none of them possessed those
qualities of mind which Mr. Miller has exhibited in his writings; and,
with the exception of Burns, the uneducated genius which has done honor
to Scotland during the last century, has never displayed that mental
refinement, and classical taste, and intellectual energy, which mark all
the writings of our author. We wish that we could have gratified our
readers with an authentic and even detailed narrative of the previous
history of so remarkable a writer, and of the steps by which his
knowledge was acquired, and the difficulties which he encountered in its
pursuit; but though this is not, to any great extent, in our power, we
shall at least be able, chiefly from Mr. Miller’s own writings, to follow
him throughout his geological career.
Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty, of humble but respectable parents, whose
history would have possessed no inconsiderable interest, even if it had
not derived one of a higher kind from the genius and fortunes of their
child. By the paternal side he was descended from a race of sea-faring
people, whose family burying-ground, if we judge from the past, seems to
be the sea. Under its green waves his father sleeps: his grandfather, his
two granduncles, one of whom sailed round the world with Anson, lie also
there; and the same extensive cemetery contains the relics of several of
his more distant relatives. His father was but an infant of scarcely a
year old, at the death of our author’s grandfather, and had to commence
life as a poor ship-boy; but such was the energy of his mind, that, when
little turned of thirty, he had become the master and owner of a fine
large sloop, and had built himself a good house, which entitled his son
to the franchise on the passing of the Reform Bill. Having unfortunately
lost his sloop in a storm, he had to begin the world anew, and he soon
became master and owner of another, and would have thriven, had he lived;
but the hereditary fate was too strong for him, and when our author was a
little boy of five summers, his father’s fine new sloop foundered at sea
in a terrible tempest, and he and his crew were never more heard of. Mr.
Miller had two sisters younger than himself, both of whom died ere they
attained to womanhood. His mother experienced the usual difficulties
which a widow has to encounter in the decent education of her family; but
she struggled honestly and successfully, and ultimately found her reward
in the character and fame of her son. It is from this excellent woman
that Mr. Miller has inherited those sentiments and feelings which have
given energy to his talents as the defender of revealed truth, and the
champion of the Church of his fathers. She was the great granddaughter of
a venerable man, still well known to tradition in the north of Scotland
as Donald Roy of Nigg,—a sort of northern Peden, who is described in
the history of our Church as the single individual who, at the age of
eighty, when the presbytery of the district had assembled in the empty
church for the purpose of inducting an obnoxious presentee, had the
courage to protest against the intrusion, and to declare “that the blood
of the people of Nigg would be required at their hands, if they settled
a man _to the walls_ of that church.” Tradition has represented him as
a seer of visions, and a prophesier of prophecies; but whatever credit
may be given to stories of this kind, which have been told also of Knox,
Welsh, and Rutherford, this ancient champion of Non-Intrusion was a man
of genuine piety, and the savor of his ennobling beliefs and his strict
morals has survived in his family for generations. If the child of such
parents did not receive the best education which his native town could
afford, it was not their fault, nor that of his teacher. The fetters
of a gymnasium are not easily worn by the adventurous youth who has
sought and found his pleasures among the hills and on the waters. They
chafe the young and active limb that has grown vigorous under the blue
sky, and never known repose but at midnight. The young philosopher of
Cromarty was a member of this restless community; and he had been the
hero of adventures and accidents among rocks and woods, which are still
remembered in his native town. The parish school was therefore not the
scene of his enjoyments; and while he was a truant, and, with reverence
be it spoken, a dunce, while under its jurisdiction, he was busy in the
fields and on the sea-shore in collecting those stores of knowledge
which he was born to dispense among his fellow-men. He escaped, however,
from school, with the knowledge of reading, writing, and a little
arithmetic, and with the credit of uniting a great memory with a little
scholarship. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, Cuvier, he had studied
Natural History in the fields and among the mountains ere he had sought
for it in books; while the French philosopher had become a learned
naturalist before he had even looked upon the world of Nature. This
singular contrast is not difficult to explain. With a sickly constitution
and a delicate frame, the youthful Cuvier wanted that physical activity
which the observation of Nature demands. Our Scottish geologist, on the
contrary, in vigorous health, and with an iron frame, rushed to the rocks
and the sea-shore in search of the instruction which was not provided for
him at school, and which he could find no books to supply.
After receiving this measure of education, Mr. Miller set out in
February, 1821, with a heavy heart, as he himself confesses, “to make his
first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint:”—
“I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the
pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad
awake; and woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns
has instanced in his ‘Twa Dogs’ as one of the most disagreeable
of all employments—to work in a quarry. Bating the passing
uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the
portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy
beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and
woods,—a reader of curious books, when I could get them,—a
gleaner of old traditionary stories,—and now I was going to
exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind
of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to
eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The
quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble
inland bay, or frith, rather, (the Bay of Cromarty,) with a
little, clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on
the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the
district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay,
and which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly
thirty feet.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, p. 4.
After removing the loose fragments below, picks and wedges and levers
were applied in vain by our author and his brother workmen to tear up and
remove the huge strata beneath. Blasting by gunpowder became necessary. A
mass of the diluvial clay came tumbling down, “bearing with it two dead
birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures,
to die in the shelter.” While admiring the pretty cock goldfinch, and the
light-blue and grayish-yellow woodpecker, and moralizing on their fate,
the workmen were ordered to lay aside their tools, and thus ended the
first day’s labor of our young geologist. The sun was then sinking behind
the thick fir wood behind him, and the long dark shadows of the trees
stretching to the shore. Notwithstanding his blistered hands, and the
fatigue which blistered them, he found himself next morning as light of
heart as his fellow-laborers, and able to enjoy the magnificent scenery
around him, which he thus so beautifully describes:—
“There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime
lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields;
but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed
as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early
spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild
and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen
rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on a
mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the
trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There
was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky; and
the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been
traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half
way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It
rose straight on the line of a plummet for more than a thousand
yards; and then, as reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread
out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree.
Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows
of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as
if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been
chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite
hills; all above was white, and all below was purple.”—_Old Red
Sandstone_, pp. 6, 7.
In raising from its bed the large mass of strata which the gunpowder had
loosened, on the surface of the solid stone, our young quarrier descried
the ridged and furrowed ripple marks which the tide leaves upon every
sandy shore, and he wondered what had become of the waves that had thus
fretted the solid rock, and of what element they had been composed. His
admiration was equally excited by a circular depression in the sandstone,
“broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a
pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening.” And
before the day closed, a series of large stones had rolled down from the
clay, “all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed in the sea
or the bed of a river for hundreds of years.” Was the clay which enclosed
them created on the rock upon which it lay? No workman ever manufactures
a half-worn article!—were the ejaculations of the geologist at his
alphabet.
Our author and his companions were soon removed to an easier wrought
quarry, and one more pregnant with interest, which had been opened “in
a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray
Frith.” Here the geology of the district exhibited itself in section.
“We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of
granite and quartz,—its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its
huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in
another, with its bed of sandstone and shale,—its spars, its
clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little
known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Red Sandstone
in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells and
lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two
several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped
with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,—basalts,
ironstones, hypersthenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and
micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all
Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better
field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for
geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without
guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might,
and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the
process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts
contained in these few sentences were the patient gatherings of
years.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, pp. 9, 10.
In this rich field of inquiry, our author encountered, almost daily, new
objects of wonder and instruction. In one nodular mass of limestone he
found the beautiful ammonite, like one of the finely sculptured volutes
of an Ionic capital. Within others, fish-scales and bivalve shells;
and in the centre of another he detected a piece of decayed wood. Upon
quitting the quarry for the building upon which the workmen were to be
employed, the workmen received half a holiday, and our young philosopher
devoted this valuable interval to search for certain curiously shaped
stones, which one of the quarriers told him resembled the heads of
boarding-pikes, and which, under the name of _thunder-bolts_, were held
to be a sovereign remedy for cattle that had been bewitched. On the
shore two miles off, where he expected these remarkable bodies, he found
deposits quite different either from the sandstone cliffs or the primary
rocks further to the west. They consisted of “thin strata of limestone,
alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance,” which burned
with a bright flame and a bituminous odor. Though only the eighth part
of an inch thick, each layer contained thousands of fossils peculiar to
the lias,—scallops and gryphites, ammonites, twigs and leaves of plants,
cones of pine, pieces of charcoal, and scales of fishes,—the impressions
being of a chalky whiteness, contrasting strikingly with their black
bituminous lair. Among these fragments of animal and vegetable life, he
at last detected his _thunder-bolt_ in the form of a Belemnite, the
remains of a kind of cuttle-fish long since extinct.
In the exercise of his profession, which “was a wandering one,” our
author advanced steadily, though slowly and surely, in his geological
acquirements.
“I remember,” says he, “passing direct on one occasion from the
wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone
leans at a high angle against the prevailing quartz rock of
the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian,
the mountain limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided
one season on a raised beach on the Moray Frith. I have spent
the season immediately following amid the ancient granites
and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north,
I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the
Oolite; in the south, I have disinterred from their matrices
of stone or of shale the huge reeds and tree ferns of the
carboniferous period.... In the north, there occurs a vast gap
in the scale. The Lias leans unconformably against the Old Red
Sandstone; there is no mountain limestone, no coal measures,
none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones. There are at least
three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the
scale is well-nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from
the Lower to the Upper Lias, in another from the Inferior to
the Great Oolite, and onward to the Oxford Clay and the Coral
Rag. We may explore in a third locality beds identical in their
organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. In a fourth, we find the
flints and fossils of the chalk. The lower part of the scale
is also well-nigh complete. The Old Red Sandstone is amply
developed in Moray, Caithness, and Ross, and the Grauwacke very
extensively in Banffshire. But to acquaint one’s self with
the three missing formations,—to complete one’s knowledge of
the entire scale, by filling up the hiatus,—it is necessary
to remove to the south. The geology of the Lothians is the
geology of at least two thirds of the gap, and perhaps a little
more;—the geology of Arran wants only a few of the upper
beds of the New Red Sandstone to fill it entirely.”—_Old Red
Sandstone_, pp. 13-17.
After having spent nearly fifteen years in the profession of a
stone-mason, Mr. Miller was promoted to a position more suited to his
genius. When a bank was established in his native town of Cromarty, he
received the appointment of accountant, and he was thus employed, for
five years, in keeping ledgers and discounting bills. When the contest in
the Church of Scotland had come to a close, by the decision of the House
of Lords in the Auchterurder Case, Mr. Miller’s celebrated letter to Lord
Brougham attracted the particular attention of the party which was about
to leave the Establishment, and he was selected as the most competent
person to conduct the _Witness_ newspaper, the principal metropolitan
organ of the Free Church. The great success which this journal has
met with is owing, doubtless, to the fine articles, political,
ecclesiastical, and geological, which Mr. Miller has written for it. In
the few leisure hours which so engrossing an occupation has allowed him
to enjoy, he has devoted himself to the ardent prosecution of scientific
inquiries; and we trust the time is not far distant when the liberality
of his country, to which he has done so much honor, will allow him to
give his whole time to the prosecution of science.
Geologists of high character had believed that the Old Red Sandstone
was defective in organic remains; and it was not till after ten years’
acquaintance with it that Mr. Miller discovered it to be _richly
fossiliferous_. The labors of other ten years were required to assign to
its fossils their exact place in the scale.
Among the fossils discovered by our author, the _Pterichthys_ or winged
fish is doubtless the most remarkable. He had disinterred it so early as
1831, but it was only in 1838 that he “introduced it to the acquaintance
of geologists.” It was not till 1831 that Mr. Miller began to receive
assistance in his studies from without. In the appendix to Messrs.
Anderson of Inverness’s admirable _Guide to the Highlands and Islands of
Scotland_, which “he perused with intense interest,” he found the most
important information respecting the geology of the North of Scotland;
and during a correspondence with the accomplished authors of that work,
many of his views were developed, and his difficulties removed. In
1838, he communicated to Dr. Malcolmson of Madras, then in Paris, a
drawing and description of the _Pterichthys_. His letter was submitted
to Agassiz, and subsequently a restored drawing was communicated to the
Elgin Scientific Society. The great naturalist, as well as the members
of the provincial society, were surprised at the new form of life
which Mr. Miller had disclosed, and some of them, no doubt, regarded
it with a sceptical eye. “Not many months after, however, a true _bona
fide Pterichthys_ was turned up in one of the newly-discovered beds of
Nairnshire.” In his last visit to Scotland, Agassiz found six species of
the _Pterichthys_, three of which, and the wings of a fourth, were in Mr.
Miller’s collection.
This remarkable animal has less resemblance than any other fossil of
the Old Red Sandstone to anything that now exists. When first brought
to view by the single blow of a hammer, there appeared on a ground of
light-colored limestone the effigy of a creature, fashioned apparently
out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful looking arms
articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as
that of the ray, (or skate,) and a long angular tail, equal in length to
a third of the entire figure. Its general resemblance is to the letter
T,—the upper part of the vertical line being swelled out, and the lower
part ending in an angular point, the two horizontal portions being, in
the opinion of Agassiz, organs of locomotion. To this remarkable fossil
M. Agassiz has given the appropriate name of _Pterichthys Milleri_. An
account of it, accompanied with two fine specimens, was communicated
to the Geological Section of the British Association at Glasgow, in
September, 1840; and the most ample details, with accurate drawings,
were afterwards published, in 1841, in Mr. Miller’s first work, _The Old
Red Sandstone_, which was dedicated to Sir Roderick Murchison, who was
born on the Old Red Sandstone of the North, in the same district as Mr.
Miller, and whose great acquirements and distinguished labors are known
all over the world among scientific men. This admirable work has already
passed through three editions. From the originality and accuracy of its
descriptions, and the importance of the researches which it contains, it
has obtained for its author a high reputation among geologists; while
from the elegance and purity of its style, and the force and liveliness
of its illustrations, it has received the highest praise from its more
general readers.[1]
Although we have been obliged, from the information which it contains
of our author’s early studies, to mention the “Old Red Sandstone” as if
it had been his first work; yet so early as 1830, after he had made his
first fossil discoveries at Cromarty, he composed a paper on the subject,
(his first published production,) which appeared as one of the chapters
of a small legendary and descriptive work, entitled _The Traditional
History of Cromarty_, which did not appear till 1835. This chapter,
entitled “The Antiquary of the World,” possesses a high degree of
interest. After describing the scene around him in its pictorial aspect,
and under the warm associations, which link it with existing life, he
surveys it with the cool eye of an “antiquary of the world,” studying
its once buried monuments, and decyphering the alphabet of plants and
animals, the hieroglyphics which embosom the history of past times and
of successive creations. The gigantic Ben Wevis, with its attendant
hills, rose abruptly to the west. The distant peaks of Ben Vaichard
appeared in the south, and far to the north were descried the lofty
hills of Sutherland, and even the Ord-hill of Caithness. Descending from
the towers of nature’s lofty edifice he surveys its ruins, its broken
sculptures, and its half-defaced inscriptions, as exhibited in certain
Ichthyic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone which had then no name,
and which were unknown to the most accomplished geologists. Among these
he specially notices “a confused bituminous-looking mass that had much
the appearance of a toad or frog,” thus shadowing forth in the morning
twilight the curious _Pterichthys_, which he was able afterwards, in
better specimens, to exhibit in open day. As we have already referred,
with some minuteness, to the fossils which our author had at this time
discovered in the great charnel-house of the old world, we shall indulge
our readers with a specimen of the noble sentiments which they inspired,
and of the beautiful language in which these sentiments are clothed.
“But let us quit this wonderful city of the dead, with all
its reclining obelisks, and all its sculptured tumuli, the
memorials of a race that exist only in their tombs. And yet,
ere we go, it were well, perhaps, to indulge in some of those
serious thoughts which we so naturally associate with the
solitary burying-ground and the mutilated remains of the
departed. Let us once more look around us, and say, whether,
of all men, the Geologist does not stand most in need of
the Bible, however much he may contemn it in the pride of
speculation. We tread on the remains of organized and sentient
creatures, which, though more numerous at one period than the
whole family of man, have long since ceased to exist; the
individuals perished one after one—their remains served only
to elevate the floor on which their descendants pursued the
various instincts of their nature, and then sunk, like the
others, to form a still higher layer of soil; and now that the
whole race has passed from the earth, and we see the animals
of a different tribe occupying their places, what survives of
them but a mass of inert and senseless matter, never again
to be animated by the mysterious spirit of vitality—that
spirit which, dissipated in the air, or diffused in the ocean,
can, like the sweet sounds and pleasant odors of the past,
be neither gathered up nor recalled! And O, how dark the
analogy which would lead us to anticipate a similar fate for
ourselves! As individuals, we are but as yesterday; to-morrow
we shall be laid in our graves, and the tread of the coming
generation shall be over our heads. Nay, have we not seen a
terrible disease sweep away, in a few years, more than eighty
millions of the race to which we belong; and can we think of
this and say that a time may not come when, like the fossils
of these beds our whole species shall be mingled with the
soil, and when, though the sun may look down in his strength
on our pleasant dwellings and our green fields, there shall be
silence in all our borders, and desolation in all our gates,
and we shall have no thought of that past which it is now our
delight to recall, and no portion in that future which it is
now our very nature to anticipate. Surely it is well to believe
that a widely different destiny awaits us—that the _God_ who
endowed us with those wonderful powers, which enable us to
live in every departed era, every coming period, has given us
to possess these powers forever; that not only does he number
the hairs of our heads, but that his cares are extended to
even our very remains; that our very bones, instead of being
left, like the exuviæ around us, to form the rocks and clays
of a future world, shall, like those in the valley of vision,
be again clothed with muscle and sinew, and that our bodies,
animated by the warmth and vigor of life, shall again connect
our souls to the matter existing around us, and be obedient to
every impulse of the will. It is surely no time, when we walk
amid the dark cemeteries of a departed world, and see the cold
blank shadows of the tombs falling drearily athwart the way—it
is surely no time to extinguish the light given us to shine so
fully and so cheerfully on our own proper path, merely because
its beams do not enlighten the recesses that yawn around us.
And O, what more unworthy of reasonable men than to reject
so consoling a revelation on no juster quarrel, than when it
unveils to us much of what could not otherwise be known, and
without the knowledge of which we could not be other than
unhappy, it leaves to the invigorating exercises of our own
powers whatever, in the wide circle of creation, lies fully
within their grasp!”—_The Antiquary of the World_, pp. 56-58.
The next work published by Mr. Miller was entitled “_First Impressions
of England and its People_,”[2] a popular and interesting volume, which
has already gone through two editions, and which may be read with equal
interest by the geologist, the philanthropist, and the general reader. It
is full of knowledge and of anecdote, and is written in that attractive
style which commands the attention even of the most incurious readers.
This delightful work, though only in _one_ volume, is equal to _three_ of
the ordinary type, and cannot fail to be perused with high gratification
by all classes of readers. It treats of every subject which is presented
to the notice of an accomplished traveller while he visits the great
cities and romantic localities of merry England. We know of no tour
in England written by a native in which so much pleasant reading and
substantial instruction are combined; and though we are occasionally
stopped in a very delightful locality by a precipice of the Old Red
Sandstone, or frightened by a disinterred skeleton, or sobered by the
burial-service over Palæozoic graves, we soon recover our equanimity,
and again enter upon the sunny path to which our author never fails to
restore us.
Mr. Miller’s new work, the “_Footprints of the Creator_,” of which
we publish now another edition, authorized by the writer, is very
appropriately dedicated to Sir Philip Grey Egerton, Bart., M. P. for
Cheshire—a gentleman who possesses a magnificent collection of fossils,
and whose skill and acquirements in this department of geology is
known and appreciated both in Europe and America. The work itself is
divided into fifteen chapters, in which the author treats of the fossil
geology of the Orkneys, as exhibited in the vicinity of Stromness; of
the development hypothesis, and its consequences; of the history and
structure of that remarkable fish, the Asterolepis; of the fishes of the
Upper and Lower Silurian rocks; of the progress of degradation, and its
history; of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the origin of plants, and its
consequences; of the Marine and Terrestrial floras; and of final causes,
and their bearing on geological history. In the course of these chapters
Mr. Miller discusses the development hypothesis, or the hypothesis of
natural law, as maintained by Lamarck and by the author of the Vestiges
of Creation, and has subjected it, in its geological aspect, to the most
rigorous examination. Driven by the discoveries of Lord Rosse from the
domains of astronomy, where it once seemed to hold a plausible position,
it might have lingered with the appearance of life among the ambiguities
of the Palæozoic formations; but Mr. Miller has, with an ingenuity and
patience worthy of a better subject, stripped it even of its semblance
of truth, and restored to the Creator, as Governor of the universe, that
power and those functions which he was supposed to have resigned at its
birth.