Hugh Miller — Stonemason, Geologist, Writer

  • Michael A Taylor
National Museums of Scotland Publishing: 2007. 144 pp. £12.99 1905267053 | ISBN: 1-905-26705-3

The Cromarty Firth in Scotland currently harbours huge oil-drilling platforms. At night, the town of Cromarty offers a spectacular ballet of illuminated Eiffel Towers swaying silently on the sea, opposite the shore where, around 1830, Hugh Miller (1802–1856) took his first steps in geology by collecting fossils. The oil from the North Sea and the platforms are symbols of utilitarian geology, but few people today know of Miller's role in defending and popularizing the notion of long geological time and the use of fossils for dating rocks, thereby making Victorian economists realize that “geology... has also its cash value”.

Hugh Miller, reporting for The Witness newspaper on the launch of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843. Credit: G. THOMSON/FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND

Michael Taylor's Hugh Miller is a remarkable account of the life of this extraordinary Scotsman, known by scientists for his role in the early history of palaeontology and geology, and by Scotsmen for his writings about Scottish folklore, history and nature, as well as for his role in the disruption that led to the birth of the Free Church of Scotland (the 'Kirk') in 1843. Much has been written about the various aspects of Miller's life, but often in an unbalanced way, focusing on nature, society or religion. Taylor's biography provides an outstanding synthesis of all the facets of Miller's activities, from his childhood in Cromarty, his manual labour as a stonemason and his discoveries as a self-taught palaeontologist, to his career as editor of the newspaper The Witness and his suicide in 1856. Moreover, this book draws heavily on Hugh Miller's writings and letters.

Taylor reconstructs the character: how Miller, draped in plaid, rambled in search for fossils or inspiration, and how he behaved in family life or when socializing and debating “Kirk” questions. This gives colour to the austere text and engravings of his books Old Red Sandstone (1841), Footprints of the Creator (1849) and Testimony of the Rocks (1857), which are classics in Britain and among the Scottish diaspora worldwide, and are masterpieces of Victorian popular science.

Miller's previous biographies seeded some myths that Taylor refutes. For example, Miller did not become interested in fossils because he was a stonemason in his youth, since the stones he carved were generally barren. Also, he did not commit suicide because he could not reconcile the long geological time with Genesis, Taylor argues, nor because he was depressed by the disastrous causes of the Highland Clearances. He was simply overworked and suffered from a brain disorder that caused him unbearable headaches and dreadful nightmares.

Miller's interest in geology was triggered by his findings on the shore of the Cromarty Firth, notably of the strange 390-million-year-old armoured fishes in red sandstone from the Devonian period, whose anatomy was then mysterious. John Malcolmson, a learned amateur naturalist, introduced Miller to the great names of geology and palaeontology, such as Roderick Murchison and Louis Agassiz, who confirmed that his findings were the earliest fishes known at that time.

Miller was fascinated by these fishes from “a different creation”, now known as antiarchs (Pterichthyodes) and arthrodires (Coccosteus) and, as he was a talented artist and a remarkable observer, he provided the first reconstructions of their bony armour, which Agassiz praised. Encouraged by this international recognition, Miller developed a tremendous interest in the relative age of rock layers and the fossils they contain. This field of geology, now called biostratigraphy, had just begun to be formalized and the succession of entirely different fossil animals and plants through time was generally interpreted as a series of catastrophes and new creations, an explanation that at first seemed to fit with Miller's religious faith.

However, he quickly realized that a literal explanation of this succession of creations in the light of Genesis was untenable. Rejecting the pre-darwinian, transformist ideas of his time, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's or Robert Chambers', he took Agassiz' views of the 'three-fold parallelism' as evidence for a divine plan. He believed in the classification of living beings based on the hierarchy of the characteristics — the more general the characteristics, the earlier they appear in time and the earlier they occur in the embryo. By this reasoning, the earliest fossil organisms, being closer to Creation, were, like early embryos, more 'perfect', whereas their living representatives, like adults, were 'degraded'. This idea of the 'progress of degradation' was widespread among naturalists of that time and at odds with the darwinian view of evolution as a progress toward adaptation and fitness.

Miller died three years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published. He is, as Taylor puts it, “regarded as a loser in the crucial evolutionary debate... That is simply because it never really began in Miller's lifetime.” But Miller, along with other contemporary palaeontologists, paved the way to evolutionary concepts. All that was missing was a process that did not need divine intervention, and Darwin provided it.

Hugh Miller is superbly written, clear and readily accessible to those who have no background in geology, palaeontology or Scottish history. It is to be strongly recommended to historians of science, lay naturalists and any reader interested in Scottish life and history.