In 1841 the Scottish stonemason Hugh Miller described the method he used to become an influential geologist. Drawing an analogy between geological strata and botanical specimen sheets, he wrote, ‘We may turn over these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of a herbarium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every page.’ The account appeared in The Old Red Sandstone (vol. 2, p. 11), a book filled with breathtaking descriptions and engravings of palaeontological fossils Miller unearthed in northwestern Scotland. Geology was a new science and the public yearned to learn about the Earth’s history. The book became a favourite of experts and the public alike, going through several editions in Miller’s lifetime.
Miller’s book was neglected during the twentieth century, but scholars rediscovered his contributions a few decades ago and several edited volumes about him have since appeared. The most recent is Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor’s two-volume publication about Miller and his ideas as presented in The Old Red Sandstone. Volume 1, Critical Study, is a monograph offering perspicuous chapters about Sandstone’s geological and literary context. Special attention is given to the book’s publication history, and the volume’s appendices helpfully explain Miller’s many geological terms and concepts. Volume 2, The Text, is a high-quality facsimile republication of the book’s 1841 first edition, complete with helpful annotations and images. Published by the National Museums of Scotland, the volumes stand as the most significant study of Miller to date.
Miller, an autodidact, evangelical and vociferous reader, performed heroic feats of travel and collecting. After the dust from his stonemasonry career damaged his lungs, he became a journalist, founding an evangelical newspaper in 1840. He wrote thousands of words per week, fusing geology with a religious sense of wonder. As Taylor and O’Connor’s reconstruction of his book’s publication history shows, Miller’s newspaper articles were the basis for the empirical, but highly readable, first edition of The Old Red Sandstone. The title referred to a geological stratum especially accessible in west and northwest Scotland. The stratagraphic models of the day considered it to be among the oldest because it contained marine life forms. Using his specimens and those of other Scottish fossil collectors, he walked readers through a bygone world of bizarrely fascinating marine creatures and mineralogical oddities.
In addition to Miller, the stratum fascinated gentleman geologists such as Roderick Murchison, Charles Lyell and Gideon Mantell in the south of England. Their personal wealth and large collaborative teams allowed them to pursue geology on a grand scale. Two years before Miller published Sandstone, Murchison’s The Silurian System (1839) hypothesized that the Old Red Sandstone stratum ran continuously under all of western Britain. Yet no amount of wealth could transport elite geologists across the country to the multitude of sites that potentially contained specimens relevant to Murchison’s theory. Elite geologists needed to collaborate with local knowledge brokers and experts. Taylor and O’Connor deliver notable insight into Miller’s importance to such theorists when they performed fieldwork in Scotland or when they required Scottish palaeontological specimens to date the sub-layers of the Old Red Sandstone.
To explain the causes that shaped the Earth’s structure, Miller’s older geological contemporaries pointed to sudden catastrophes – volcanic eruptions or immense deluges. Younger geologists, such as Lyell, pointed to gradual, uniform changes over long periods. Taylor and O’Connor argue that Miller was a gradual catastrophist. In this model, each stratum built up via thick layers in which life forms became more complex over time, its accretion ceasing with a catastrophic event ending its formation, and all life within it. Each new stratum initiated new life forms that started anew with simple structures. The model’s recapitulatory nature offered a categorically different mode of development than that given by contemporary evolutionists such as Robert Chambers or the young Charles Darwin. Taylor and O’Connor convincingly maintain that Miller was not a transmutationist, but a supporter of ‘gradual stepwise change’ in ‘successive creations’ of life.
Miller was a steadfast evangelical. Three years after publishing Sandstone, he participated in the ‘Great Disruption’, which split the Church of Scotland. He left the church to help lead the new Free Church of Scotland, which saw natural science as a tool to improve everyday people’s lives. Numerous scientists were members. In 1845 the church created the chair of natural science at New College in Edinburgh, its new seminary. It appointed John Fleming, a natural historian whom Miller cites in Sandstone. Both were Free Church members who greatly valued science. Taylor and O’Connor note Miller’s resolute belief, common at the time, in a divine engineer who had guided the formation of each geological stratum as well as the structure of the organisms therein. Miller, though, did not seek to address secondary causes responsible for his mineralogical and palaeontological specimens because broad theoretical moves ran counter to his commitment to empirical methodologies.
Instead, Miller was content to reflect on the order and beauty of the marvellous life forms that once existed. This, Taylor and O’Connor emphasize, likely impelled his continual returns to the field to unearth an abundance of fantastic specimens. Miller’s natural theology was egalitarian, not confined to elite societies and expensive books. He wrote, ‘There is no working man, if he be a person of intelligence and information … who may not derive much pleasure and enlargement of idea from the study of Geology.’ For him, geology, as a mode of contemplation, far surpassed the ‘truths’ offered by the natural theology of elite divines (vol. 2, p. 37). As a self-taught geologist and lay member of the Free Church, Miller found truth through direct experience, through reading the wonderous depictions of nature in Scripture and through witnessing them first-hand in the field.
Scientific and cultural insights abound in The Study and the annotations of The Text. In an age when publishers shrink from monographs and facsimile reproductions, the National Museum of Scotland has offered a great service by supporting Taylor and O’Connor’s project. The books meet Miller on his terms and help the reader understand his career as an important episode in the history of the nascent earth and palaeontological sciences. This is a fine study about a fascinating and unduly neglected Scottish scientist.
