Hugh Miller

by W. Keith Leask

Rose out of chaos";

and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details.'

The Origin of Species in 1859 was issued after Miller's death, but the leading doctrines of Darwin were not unknown before that time to the public through the appearance of Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, and a subsequent volume of 'Explanations' in 1846. This book caused almost as considerable a stir as that of Darwin himself, and the greatest care was taken by Chambers to conceal the authorship. The proof-sheets sent to Mr. Ireland in Manchester, were returned to the writer, who reforwarded them to Ireland, who in his turn despatched them to London. The guesses at the author ranged from Sir Charles Lyell up to the Prince Consort; and so strong were the feelings aroused that they defeated a proposal to bring in Chambers as Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1848, and the secret was not formally divulged till the issue by Ireland in 1884 of a twelfth edition. The book is written in a 'powerful and brilliant style,' as Darwin says; and, though long out of print, its re-issue by Routledge and Son in their Universal Library has again drawn attention to its views, which in Scotland caused something of the stir produced by the appearance in England of Essays and Reviews. Chambers, indeed, regarded his book as 'the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. As such, it must necessarily be crude and unsatisfactory, yet I have thought the time was come for attempting to weave a great generalisation out of established natural truths.' Much of the popular ideas or misconceptions about the geological record is due to the Vestiges. It is not very strong in logic nor exact in individual branches of science, yet its influence fully merited the detailed reply by Miller, in 1847, in the Footprints of the Creator, which he appropriately dedicated to Sir Philip Egerton, the highest authority on fossil fishes.

Chambers and his school had largely subscribed to the doctrines of Oken, by which no organism had been created of larger size than an infusorial point, and no organism created which was not microscopic; whatever exists larger, man himself included, having been developed and not created. To this Miller replies that this at least is not the testimony of the rocks. If it were true, it would follow that the oldest fossils would be small, and low in organisation. But, so far is this from being the case that the oldest organisms, whether that be the asterolepis or the cephalaspidæ or the acanthidæ, are large and high. One asterolepis found at Thurso measures over twelve feet, and a Russian specimen described by Professor Asmus of Dorpat seems to have reached the astonishing length of twenty-three feet. Thus, the earliest organisms 'instead of taking their place, agreeably to the demands of the development hypothesis, among the sprats, sticklebacks, and minnows of their class, took their place among its huge and basking sharks, gigantic sturgeons, and bulky sword-fishes. They were giants, not dwarfs.'

The prevalence of the brachiopods in the Silurian period over the cephalaspidæ proves little. What the naturalist has to deal with is not quantity but quality, 'not the number of the low, but the standing of the high. A country may be distinctly a country of flocks and herds, or a country of carnivorous mammalia, or like New South Wales or the Galapagos, a country of marsupial animals or of reptiles. Its human inhabitants may be merely a few hunters or shepherds, too inconsiderable in numbers to give it any peculiar standing as a home of men. But in estimating the highest point in the scale to which the animal kingdom has attained, it is of the few men, not of its many beasts, that we must take note.' Thus he maintains that the existence of a single cephalopod or one cuttlefish among a wilderness of brachiopods is sufficient to indicate the mark already attained in the scale of being, just as the existence of the human family, when restricted to a pair, indicated as clearly the scale as when its existence can be counted by millions. Under the clearing-system in the Western Highlands, Miller had, during 'the cruise of the Betsey,' noticed in the island of Rum a single shepherd and eight thousand sheep. Yet the human unit, to the naturalist, would outweigh all the lower organisms. Moreover, the brachiopods of the palæozoic age he would regard as larger than those existing now which have sunk by 'degradation' into inferior importance.

The proof of the development theory in the realm of fossil flora he would regard as still more questionable. It had been asserted that in the carboniferous age no exogenous plant had appeared; that before the Lias nature had not succeeded in producing a tree, and that the vegetation of the coal-measures had been 'magnificent immaturities' of the vegetable kingdom. But the quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh, alone would refute it, not to speak of the coal-fields of Dalkeith and Falkirk with their araucarians and pines. While Brongniart had denied to the Lower 'Old Red' anything higher than a lichen or a moss, 'the ship carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore the woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton:

"Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great ammiral."'

It might be thought, however, that to the geological argument from development some consolation might be left from the general fact of the lower producing the higher. Yet even here the Lamarckian theory fails. Fishes were earlier than the beasts of the field and man. But we are still a long way from any proof that 'the peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring time'; or that the predecessors of man were his progenitors. So far as geology is concerned, superposition is not parental relation, so that there is no necessity for the lower producing the higher. Nor has transmutation of marine into terrestrial vegetation been proved. This had been the mainstay of the Lamarckian hypothesis, and had been adopted from the brilliant but fancifully written Telliamed (an anagram, by the way, of the author's name) of De Maillet by both Oken and Chambers, who had found in the Delphinidæ the marine progenitors of the Simiadæ, and through them of man—a curious approximation to some recent crude ideas of Professor Drummond in his Ascent of Man. They had pointed to the general or supposed agreement in fauna and flora between the Galapagos and South America, between the Cape de Verde Islands and Africa; yet in such a period of conversion plants of an intermediate character would be found, and thousands of years have failed to produce such a specimen. Thus geology, botany, and zoology would seem to afford slight support to the Darwinian theory, at least in the state of the argument as presented in the Vestiges, unless a very large draft upon the mere imagination is made.

And such a demand is made by Darwin. 'If,' says he, 'my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that, during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world teemed with living creatures.' This, however, we may say with the Regent Morton, is only 'a devout imagination'; and it might be more scientific to take the geological record as we find it, for, says Miller, 'it is difficult to imagine that that uniform cessation of organised life at one point, which seems to have conducted Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick to their conclusion, should thus have been a mere effect of accident. Accident has its laws, but uniformity is not one of them; and should the experience be invariable, as it already seems extensive, that immediately beneath the fucoidal beds organic remains cease, I do not see how the conclusion is to be avoided, that they represent the period in which, at least, existences capable of preservation were first introduced.' Indeed the hypothesis of Darwin would fall under the remark of Herodotus, that the old theorisers and speculators at the last resort betook themselves to a belief in an imaginary ocean-river or to something in the interior of the earth where observation was of necessity excluded. For, as Professor Bain says, the assertion of a fact wholly beyond the reach of evidence for or against, is to be held as untrue: we are not obliged to show that a thing is not,—the burden lies on them who maintain that the thing is.