Hugh Miller was born in Cromarty, in the North of Scotland, October
10, 1802. From the time he was seventeen until he was thirty-four,
he worked as a common stone-mason, although devoting his leisure
hours to independent researches in natural history, for which he
formed a taste early in life. He became interested in journalism,
and was editor of the Edinburgh "Witness," when, in 1840, he
published the contents of the volume issued a year later as "The
Old Red Sandstone." The book deals with its author's most
distinctive work, namely, finding fossils that tell much of the
history of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and fixing in the
geological scale the place to which the larger beds of remains
found in the system belong. Besides being a practical and original
geologist, Miller had a fine imaginative power, which enabled him
to reconstruct the past from its ruinous relics. The fact that he
unfortunately set himself the task of combating the theory of
evolution, which was fast gaining ground in his day, should not
blind us to the high value of his geological experiences. The
results of his observations provide some of the most cogent proofs
of the theory he disputed. Late in life Miller's mind gave way, and
he put an end to his own life on December 24, 1856.
_I.--A Stone-mason's Researches_
My advice to young working men desirous of bettering their
circumstances, and adding to the amount of their enjoyment, is to seek
happiness in study. Learn to make a right use of your eyes; the
commonest things are worth looking at--even stones, weeds, and the most
familiar animals. There are none of the intellectual or moral faculties,
the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment; hence it is that
happiness bears so little reference to station.
Twenty years ago I made my first acquaintance with a life of labour 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 in a quarry. I was going to
exchange all my day-dreams 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!
That first day was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I
had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt
nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I
had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much
as usual. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my
brother-workmen. That night, arising out of my employment, I found I had
food enough for thought without once thinking of the unhappiness of a
life of labour.
In the course of the day I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone,
and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it
contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture, one of the
volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital. Was there another such
curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of
similar appearance, and found that there might be. In one of these there
were what seemed to be scales of fishes and the impressions of a few
minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was
actually a piece of decayed wood.
Of all nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most
interesting and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them
carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them
that there was a part of the shore, about two miles further to the west,
where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of
boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up, and that in his father's
day the country people called them thunderbolts. Our first half-holiday
I employed in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so
thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have
fancied even in my dreams.
My first year of labour came to a close, and I found that the amount of
my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood. My
knowledge had increased in more than the ratio of former seasons; and as
I had acquired the skill of at least the common mechanic, I had fitted
myself for independence.
My curiosity, once fully awakened, remained awake, and my opportunities
of gratifying it have been tolerably ample. I have been an explorer of
caves and ravines, a loiterer along sea-shores, a climber among rocks, a
labourer in quarries. My profession was a wandering one. I remember
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 of the district, to where, on the southern skirts
of Midlothian, the Mountain Limestone rises amid the coal. I have
resided one season on a raised beach of the Moray Firth. I have spent
the season immediately following amid the ancient granite 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 reds and
tree ferns of the carboniferous period.
I advise the stone-mason to acquaint himself with geology. Much of his
time must be spent amid the rocks and quarries of widely separated
localities, and so, in the course of a few years he may pass over the
whole geological scale, and this, too, with opportunities of observation
at every stage which can be shared with him by only the gentleman of
fortune who devotes his whole time to study. Nay, in some respects, his
advantages are superior to those of the amateur, for the man whose
employments have to be carried on in the same formation for months,
perhaps years, enjoys better opportunities of arriving at just
conclusions. There are formations which yield their organisms slowly to
the discoverer, and the proofs which establish their place in the
geological scale more tardily still. I was acquainted with the Old Red
Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty for nearly ten years ere I ascertained
that it is richly fossiliferous; I was acquainted with it for nearly ten
years more ere I could assign its fossils to their exact place in the
scale. Nature is vast and knowledge limited, and no individual need
despair of adding to the general fund.
_II.--Bridging Life's Gaps_
"The Old Red Sandstone," says a Scottish geologist in a digest of some
recent geological discoveries, "has hitherto been considered as
remarkably barren of fossils." Only a few years have gone by since men
of no low standing in the science disputed the very existence of this
formation--or system, rather, for it contains at least three distinct
formations. There are some of our British geologists who still regard it
as a sort of debatable tract, entitled to no independent status, a sort
of common which should be divided.
It will be found, however, that this hitherto neglected system yields in
importance to none of the others, whether we take into account its
amazing depth, the great extent to which it is developed both at home
and abroad, the interesting links which it furnishes in the geological
scale, or the vast period of time which it represents. There are
localities in which the depth of the Old Red Sandstone fully equals the
elevation of Mount Etna over the level of the sea, and in which it
contains three distinct groups of organic remains, the one rising in
beautiful progression over the other.
My first statement regarding the system must be much the reverse of the
one just quoted, for the fossils are remarkably numerous and in a state
of high preservation. I have a hundred solid proofs by which to
establish the truth of the assertion within less than a yard of me. Half
my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old
Red Sandstone; and certainly a stranger assemblage of forms has rarely
been grouped together--creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and
uncouth, which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even to their class;
boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder; fish, plated over,
like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and
furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish with the
membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; creatures bristling
over with thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if
beautifully japanned; the tail in every instance among the less
equivocal shapes formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side
the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side--the column
sending out its diminished vertebræ to the extreme termination of the
fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a
Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now
exists in nature than are the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.
Lamarck, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a
certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened,
has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior orders
of being towards the superior, and that the offspring of creatures low
in the scale may belong to a different and nobler species a few thousand
years hence. Never was there a fancy so wild and extravagant. The
principle of adaptation still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the
dog a dog. It is true that it is a law of nature that the chain of being
is in some degree a continuous chain, and the various classes of
existence shade into each other. All the animal families have their
connecting links. Geology abounds with creatures of the intermediate
class.
Fishes seem to have been the master existences of two great geological
systems, mayhap of three, ere the age of reptiles began. Now, fishes
differ very much among themselves, some ranking nearly as low as worms,
some nearly as high as reptiles; and we find in the Old Red Sandstone
series of links which are wanting in the present creation, and the
absence of which occasions a wide gap between the two grand divisions of
fishes, the bony and the cartilaginous.
Of all the organisms of the system one of the most extraordinary is the
pterichthys, or winged fish, which the writer had the pleasure of
introducing to the acquaintance of geologists. Had Lamarck been the
discoverer he would unquestionably have held that he had caught a fish
almost in the act of wishing itself into a bird. There are wings which
want only feathers, a body which seems to have been as well adapted for
passing through the air as through water, and a tail with which to
steer.
My first idea regarding it was that I had discovered a connecting
link-between the tortoise and the fish. I submitted some of my specimens
to Mr. Murchison, and they furnished him with additional data by which
to construct the calculations he was then making respecting fossils, and
they added a new and very singular link to the chain of existence in its
relation to human knowledge. Agassiz confirmed the conclusions of
Murchison in almost every particular, deciding at once that the creature
must have been a fish.
Next to the pterichthys of the Lower Old Red Sandstone I shall place its
contemporary the coccosteus of Agassiz--a fish which in some respects
must have resembled it. Both were covered with an armour of thickly
tubercled bony plates, and both furnished with a vertebrated tail. The
coccosteus seems to have been most abundant. Another of the families of
the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone--the cephalaspis--seems
almost to constitute a connecting link between fishes and crustaceans.
In the present creation fishes are either osseous or cartilaginous, that
is, with bony skeletons, or with a framework of elastic,
semi-transparent animal matter, like the shark; and the ichthyolites of
the Old Red Sandstone unite these characteristics, resembling in some
respects the osseous and in others the cartilaginous tribes. Agassiz at
once confirmed my suspicion that the ichthyolites of the Old Red
Sandstone were intermediate. Though it required skill to determine the
place of the pterichthys and coccosteus there could be no mistaking the
osteolepis--it must have been a fish, and a handsome one, too. But while
its head resembled the heads of the bony fishes, its tail differed in no
respects from the tails of the cartilaginous ones. And so through the
discovery of extinct species the gaps between existing species have been
bridged.
_III.--Place-Fixing in the Dim Past_
The next step was to fix the exact place of the ichthyolites in the
geological scale, and this I was enabled to do by finding a large and
complete bed _in situ_. Its true place is a little more than a hundred
feet above the top, and not much more than a hundred yards above the
base of the great conglomerate.
The Old Red Sandstone in Scotland and in England has its lower, middle,
and upper groups--three distinct formations. As the pterichthys and
coccosteus are the characteristic ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red
formation, so the cephalaspis distinguishes the middle or coronstone
division of the system in England. When we pass to the upper formation,
we find the holoptychius the most characteristic fossil.
These fossils are found in a degree of entireness which depends less on
their age than on the nature of the rock in which they occur. Limestone
is the preserving salt of the geological world, and the conservative
qualities of the shales and stratified clays of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone are not much inferior to limestone itself; while in the Upper
Old Red the beds of consolidated sand are much less conservative of
organic remains. The older fossils, therefore, can be described almost
as minutely as the existence of the present creation, whereas the newer
fossils exist, except in a few rare cases, as fragments, and demand the
powers of a Cuvier or an Agassiz to restore them to their original
combinations. On the other hand, while the organisms of the Lower Old
Red are numerous and well preserved, those of the Upper Old Red are much
greater in individual size. In short, the fish of the lower ocean must
have ranged in size between a stickleback and a cod; whereas some of the
fish of the ocean of the Upper Sandstone were covered with scales as
large as oyster shells, and were armed with teeth that rivalled in size
those of the crocodile.
_IV.--Fish as Nature's Last Word_
I will now attempt to present to the reader the Old Red Sandstone as it
existed in time--during the succeeding periods of its formation, and
when its existences lived and moved as the denizens of primeval oceans.
We pass from the cemetery with its heaps of bones to the ancient city
full of life and animation in all its streets and dwellings.
Before we commence our picture, two great geological periods have come
to their close, and the floor of the widely spread ocean is occupied to
the depth of many thousand feet by the remains of bygone existences. The
rocks of these two earlier periods are those of the Cambrian and
Silurian groups. The lower--Cambrian, representative of the first
glimmering twilight of being--must be regarded as a period of
uncertainty. It remains for future discoverers to determine regarding
the shapes of life that burrowed in its ooze or careered through the
incumbent waters.
There is less doubt respecting the existences of the Silurian rocks.
Four distinct platforms of being range in it, the one over the other,
like the stories of a building. Life abounded on all these platforms,
and in shapes the most wonderful. In the period of the Upper Silurian
fish, properly so called, and of a very perfect organisation, had taken
precedence of the crustacean. These most ancient beings of their class
were cartilaginous fishes, and they appear to have been introduced by
myriads. Such are the remains of what seem to have been the first
vertebrata.
The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in
what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened amid
confusion and turmoil. The finely laminated Tilestones of England were
deposited evidently in a calm sea. During the contemporary period the
space which now includes Orkney, Lochness, Dingwall, Gamrie, and many a
thousand square miles besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean,
perplexed by powerful currents and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of
water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred
yards, remains, in a thousand different localities, to testify to the
disturbing agencies of this time of commotion, though it is difficult to
conceive how the bottom of any sea could have been so violently and
equally agitated for so greatly extended a space.
The period of this shallow and stormy ocean passed, and the bottom,
composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the summit of
some of our loftiest mountains, sank to a depth so profound as to be
little affected by tides and tempests. During this second period there
took place a vast deposit of coarse sandstone strata, and the subsidence
continued until fully ninety feet had overlaid the conglomerate in
waters perfectly undisturbed. And here we find the first proof that this
ancient ocean literally swarmed with life--that its bottom was covered
with miniature forests of algae, and its waters darkened by immense
shoals of fish. I have seen the ichthyolite bed where they were as
thickly covered with fossil remains as I have ever seen a fishing-bank
covered with herrings.
At this period some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction
the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary,
perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as in Cromarty is strewn
thick with remains which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent
death. In what could it have originated? By what quiet but potent agency
of destruction could the innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten
thousand miles in extent be annihilated at once, and yet the medium in
which they lived be left undisturbed by its operations? The thought has
often struck me that calcined lime, cast out as ashes from some distant
crater and carried by the winds, might have been the cause of the widely
spread destruction to which the fossil organisms testify. I have seen
the fish of a small trouting stream, over which a bridge was in the
course of building, destroyed in a single hour, for a full mile below
the erection, by a few troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when
the centring was removed.
The period of death passed, and over the innumerable dead there settled
a soft muddy sediment. For an unknown space of time, represented in the
formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the
depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of life. A few scales and
plates then begin to appear. The fish that had existed outside the chasm
seem to have gradually gained upon it as their numbers increased.
The work of deposition went on and sandstone was overlaid by stratified
clay. This upper bed had also its organisms, but the circumstances were
less favourable to the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those in
which the organisms were wrapped up in their stony coverings. Age
followed age, generations were entombed in ever-growing depositions.
Vast periods passed, and it seemed as if the power of the Creator had
reached its extreme limit when fishes had been called into existence,
and our planet was destined to be the dwelling-place of no nobler
inhabitants.
The curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower
formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded on an upper platform
by the existences of a later creation. Shoals of cephalaspides,
feathered with fins, sweep past. We see the distant gleam of scales,
that some of the coats glitter with enamel, that others bristle over
with minute thorny points. A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions,
stalks over the weedy bottoms, or burrows in the hollows of the banks.
Ages and centuries pass--who can sum up their number?--for the depth of
this middle formation greatly exceeds that of the other two.
The curtain rises. A last day had at length come to the period of the
middle formation, and in an ocean roughened by waves and agitated by
currents we find new races of existences. We may mark the clumsy bulk of
the Holoptychius conspicuous in the group. The shark family have their
representative as before; a new variety of the pterichthys spreads out
its spear-like wings at every alarm, like its predecessor of the lower
formation. Fish still remained the lords of creation, and their bulk, at
least, had become immensely more great. We began with an age of dwarfs,
we end with an age of giants, which is carried on into the lower coal
measures. We pursue our history no further?
Has the last scene in the series arisen? Cuvier asked the question,
hesitated, and then decided in the negative, for he was too intimately
acquainted with the works of the Creator to think of limiting His power,
and he could anticipate a coming period in which man would have to
resign his post of honour to some nobler and wiser creature, the monarch
of a better and happier world.