The Firth of Cromarty in northeastern Scotland, one day in 1830. A tall, robust man in his late twenties is poking about among the rocks on the beach. The man is Hugh Miller, and every rock he picks up seems to hold a fossil.
鈥淚 LAID open a nodule with a blow of the hammer, and my heart leaped up when I saw that it enclosed an organism. A dark, ill-defined, bituminous mass occupied the centre; but I could distinguish what seemed to be spines and small ichthyic bones projecting from its edges; and when I subjected them to the scrutiny of the glass, unlike those mere chance resemblances which sometimes deceive for a moment the eye, the more distinct and unequivocal did their forms become. I laid open a second nodule. It contained a group of glittering rhomboidal scales, with a few cerebral plates, and a jaw bristling with teeth . . . I eagerly wrought on, and disinterred, in the course of a single tide, specimens enough to cover a museum table.鈥�
This was how Miller recorded his discovery of the local fossil fishes in his autobiography My Schools and Schoolmaster. Despite the title of his book, Miller was a dropout. Rather than stay on at school and study for university, he became an itinerant stonemason so that he could spend the winters writing poetry. When he developed lung disease, he returned home to Cromarty and took up lighter work carving inscriptions and gravestones. The poetry was awful. His prose was vastly better. And his fossils were among the best preserved Devonian fish yet discovered.
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Miller mentioned his fossils in a book he wrote about the local history of Cromarty, and eventually the great Swiss palaeontologist Louis Agassiz got to hear about them. Agassiz was in the middle of writing the monumental books that attempted to classify all known fossil fish, laying the foundations for subsequent research in the field. In Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, Agassiz recognised Miller鈥檚 discoveries by naming two of the most important species after him.
These fish, Coccosteus milleri and Pterichthys milleri, belonged to the placoderms, a weird group of extinct fish. They had heavily armoured heads and trunks and jaws without teeth, armed instead with shearing edges of naked bone. Here was more evidence for the idea, then so novel and strange, that past life was both extinct and totally different from today鈥檚.
Back in Scotland, Miller鈥檚 mind was elsewhere. Landowners, backed by the House of Lords, were trying to impose their choice of ministers on Scottish parishes. This profoundly offended many Scots. Miller鈥檚 pamphlet in protest led to a move to Edinburgh in 1840, and a new job as editor of The Witness, soon a thriving newspaper.
Liberal in his sympathies, Miller was one of the first to condemn the Highland Clearances. Journalism took up most of Miller鈥檚 time, but he found relief in geology. Even in town, Miller famously went about in the hairy tweeds and checked overblanket of the Scots countryman, convenient garb for impromptu fossil hunting on the walk home to the outskirts of Edinburgh.
As editor of The Witness, Miller was in a position to pen columns on any subject he liked-including science. One series of articles dealt with his fossil fish. When republished as a book in 1841, The Old Red Sandstone took the world by storm. Miller was an overnight sensation, a sort of David Attenborough and Stephen Jay Gould rolled into one. Very soon his books were 鈥渇ound in the remotest log-cabins of the Far West, and on both sides of the Atlantic ideas of the nature and scope of geology were largely drawn from them鈥�.
Miller saw the hand of God in the minute detail of a fossil fish scale. He tried to reconcile the Bible and geology by treating Genesis as a metaphor for geological time. Alas, geologists thought his idea irrelevant, and the hardline Christian literalists were annoyed.
Yet religious sentiment was just what the public wanted. Miller鈥檚 portrayal of geology as a physically and morally improving outdoor recreation bringing one closer to God through his works perfectly captured the spirit of the time. He helped to transform geology鈥檚 image from a dodgy 鈥渋nfidel science鈥� to one worthy of public support and respect.
As a good journalist, Miller naturally tackled the Big Question. In 1844, the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, written anonymously by Miller鈥檚 journalist friend Robert Chambers, set forward an evolutionary theory. Miller was outraged at the very thought of human beings as brute beasts and tore into the controversy. He rightly pointed out that complex animals such as his own Cromarty finds appeared in the fossil record before later, often simpler ones, such as some modern fishes, refuting Chambers鈥� naive ideas of simple progress from primitive to advanced organisms.
The paradox was solved by Charles Darwin鈥檚 theory of evolution by natural selection. But Miller never read On the Origin of Species. His appalling workload was as Victorian as his choice of remedy-an annual month or so fossil-hunting over Scotland.
In the end, together with his lingering lung disease, it became too much. Perhaps convinced by hallucinations that he was going mad, Miller shot himself on Christmas Eve, 1856. An awful end, but in his writings he lives on as the young man with a passion for Scotland-and fossils.