The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

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.

Having imposed upon himself the task of examining in detail the various fossiliferous formations of Scotland, our author extended his inquiries into the mainland of Orkney, and resided for some time in the vicinity of the busy seaport town of Stromness, as a central point from which the structure of the Orkney group of islands could be most advantageously studied. Like that of Caithness, the geology of these islands owes its principal interest to the immense development of the Lower Old Red Sandstone formation, and to the singular abundance of its vertebrate fossils. Though the Orkneys contain only the third part of the Old Red Sandstone, which, but a few years ago, was supposed to be the least productive in fossils of any of the geological formations, yet it furnishes, according to Mr. Miller, more fossil fish than every other geological system in England, Scotland, and Wales, from the Coal Measures to the Chalk, inclusive. It is, in short, “the land of fish,” and “could supply with ichthyolites, by the ton and by the ship-load, the museums of the world.” Its various deposits, with the curious organisms which they inclose, have been upheaved from their original position against a granitic axis, about six miles long and one broad, “forming the great back-bone of the western district of the Island Pomona; and on this granitic axis, fast jambed in between a steep hill and the sea, stands the town of Stromness.”

The mass or pile of strata thus uplifted is described by Mr. Miller as a three-barred pyramid resting on its granite base, exhibiting three broad tiers—red, black, and gray—sculptured with the hieroglyphics in which its history is recorded. The great conglomerate base on which it rests, covering from 10,000 to 15,000 square miles, from the depth of from 100 to 400 feet, consists of rough sand and water-worn pebbles; and above this have been deposited successive strata of mud, equal in height to the highest of our mountains, now containing the remains of millions and tens of millions of fish which had perished in some sudden and mysterious catastrophe.

In the examination of the different beds of the three-barred formation, our author discovered a well-marked bone, like a petrified large roofing nail, in a grayish-colored layer of hard flag, about 100 yards over the granite, and about 160 feet over the upper stratum of the conglomerate. This singular bone, which Mr. Miller has represented in a figure, was probably the oldest vertebrate organism yet discovered in Orkney. It was 5⅞ inches long, 2¼ inches across the head, and ³⁄₁₀ths of an inch thick in the stem, and formed a characteristic feature of the Asterolepis, as yet the most gigantic of the ganoid fishes, and probably one of the first of the Old Red Sandstone. In his former researches, our author had found that all of the many hundred ichthyolites which he had disinterred from the Lower Old Red Sandstone were comparatively of a small size, while those in the Upper Old Red were of great bulk; and hence he had naturally inferred, that vertebrate life had increased towards the close of the system—that, in short, it began with an age of dwarfs, and ended with an age of giants; but he had thus greatly erred, like the supporters of the development system, in founding positive conclusions on merely negative evidence; for here, at the very base of the system, where no dwarfs were to be found, he had discovered one of the most colossal of its giants.

After this most important discovery, Mr. Miller extended his inquiries easterly for several miles along the bare and unwooded Lake of Stennis, about fourteen miles in circumference, and divided into an upper arm lower sheet of water by two long promontories jutting out from each side and nearly meeting in the middle. The sea enters this lake through the openings of a long rustic bridge, and hence the lower division of the lake “is salt in its nether reaches, and brackish in its upper ones; while the higher division is merely brackish in its nether reaches, and fresh enough in its upper ones to be potable.” The fauna and flora of the lake are therefore of a mixed character, the marine and fresh water animals having each their own reaches, though each kind makes certain encroachments on the province of the other.