Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
MILLER, HUGH (b. Cromarty, Scotland, 10 October
1802; d. Portobello, Scotland, 24 December 1856),
geology.
discursive essays, leading the ordinary reader from a
starting point in everyday experience, through the
details of the anatomy of the most ancient fossil fish
and the reconstruction of their environment, toward
the broader implications that geology held for the
place of man in nature and his relation to God. Miller
was no naïve literalist (he had, for example, a most
vivid sense of the vast antiquity of the earth), but he
did believe that the fossil record confirmed in broad
outline the cosmic drama depicted symbolically in the
Bible. More particularly, his strong sense of man as a
moral being, ultimately responsible to God, led him
to attack vehemently any attempt to diminish that
responsibility by blurring the distinction between man
and the lower animals. Hence Lamarck's “theory of
progression” by transmutation was abhorrent to
him, and its revival in Robert Chambers' anonymous
Vestiges of Creation (1844) disturbed him particularly
because he saw its “infidel” tendencies spreading to
the artisan classes.
Miller's reply to Chambers was delayed by a
breakdown of health brought on by overwork and by
silicosis contracted during his years as a mason; and
in 1845 he left Scotland for the first time, subsequently
publishing his First Impressions of England (1846) with
perceptive comments on the new industrial society as
well as frequent digressions on geology. On his return
to Scotland he wrote Foot-Prints of the Creator (1847)
in answer to the Vestiges. It was explicitly an attack
on the metaphysical and theological implications of
Chambers' work, but Miller used his own scientific
research to focus his attack on one of the weakest
points in the “development hypothesis.” The fish of
the Old Red Sandstone (and the few that had been
found in still earlier strata) were not, he argued, the
rudimentary quasi-embryonic forms that Chambers'
theory required; on the contrary, these “Ganoids”--earliest
vertebrates then known--“enter large in their
stature and high in their organisation.” The geological
history of the fish suggested that they had been created
already perfect, clearly distinct from other animals,
and that a better case could be made out for their
subsequent “degradation” than for their “progress,”
since the earliest representatives were in some ways
the most complex. Miller's interpretation could be
extended to the rest of the fossil record; and he thus
derived (like Agassiz) a picture of overall “progress”
achieved by distinct creative steps, each initiating a
new and higher form of organization, culminating in
man.
More accurately, however, Miller saw the final
culmination of this vast history in an eschatological
future kingdom of Christ. This Christological focus
to Miller's interpretation of science distinguishes his
work sharply from that of most of his contemporaries,
who were concerned to “reconcile” geology
with religion. Miller was not interested in defending
natural theology except as a prelude to existential
commitment to God as revealed in Christ: dissociated
from distinctively Christian beliefs, “a belief in the
existence of a God is,” he asserted, “of as little
ethical value as a belief in the existence of the great
sea-serpent.” But by stating his opposition to
evolutionary theory in terms of a characteristically
stark antithesis--“the law of development versus the
miracle of creation”--he placed his theology and his
science in a vulnerable position during a period in
which scientific plausibility was seen increasingly in
terms of a metaphysical “principle of uniformity”
that excluded the category of miracle altogether.
Miller published an attractive account of his life
up to 1840 in My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854),
which romanticizes his early life and exaggerates his
humble origins. In the last years of his life he suffered
increasingly from mental illness, and he finally
committed suicide at his home near Edinburgh while
seeing his last collection of essays, The Testimony of
the Rocks (1857), through the press.
Miller's strictly original scientific work was of
limited scope; his studies of early fossil fish did little
more than amplify and correct some details of
Murchison's stratigraphy and Agassiz's paleontology.
His importance for nineteenth-century science lies,
rather, in his use of outstanding literary abilities to
broaden the taste for science in general and for
geology in particular, and to encourage a humane
concern for the fundamental significance of such
studies: in the words of his biographer Mackenzie,
“probably no single man since has so powerfully
moved the common mind of Scotland, or dealt with
it on more familiar and decisive terms.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
Miller's principal publications are
Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland or the Traditional
History of Cromarty (Edinburgh, 1835); The Old Red
Sandstone: Or New Walks in an Old Field (Edinburgh,
1841); First Impressions of England and Its People (London,
1846); Foot-Prints of the Creator: Or, the Asterolepis of
Stromness (Edinburgh, 1847); My Schools and Schoolmasters;
Or, the Story of My Education (Edinburgh, 1854);
and The Testimony of the Rocks; Or, Geology in Its Bearings
on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed (Edinburgh,
1857). Some of his correspondence is published in Peter
Bayne, ed., The Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, 2 vols.
(London, 1871).
II. SECONDARY LITERATURE.
A short biography is
W. Keith Leask, Hugh Miller (Edinburgh, 1896). W. M.