Now we have a hitherto unpublished autobiography, Hugh Miller’s Memoir, written between 1829 and 1830. The introduction examines Miller’s career, psychology and upbringing from several new and often interesting angles, sometimes seemingly speculatively. It is hard to assess this fully as it is based partly on an unpublished book. The memoir details its author’s life from his birth in 1802, through his wayward upbringing in the small coastal burgh of Cromarty, north of Inverness, and his rejection of academic training. Miller became a stonemason, later realising his hunger for self-education and discovering his vocation as a writer.

The Memoir complements what little remains in print by Miller: his autobiography My Schools and Schoolmasters and his Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (reissued by B & W Edinburgh). His writings on geology, alas, can now only be found secondhand, apart from a few pieces in journalist George Rosie’s Hugh Miller: Outrage and Order.

Although the Memoir was written specifically for the principal of the University of Edinburgh, it is more direct and spontaneous, and less didactic, than the later My Schools and Schoolmasters, an uplifting tale of Scottish working-class self-improvement with a moral, Presbyterian backbone. Ironically, given Miller’s troublesome school-days, good Scottish school pupils were often given My Schools as a prize. It is an interesting reflection on national attitudes to social opportunity and education that their Sassenach counterparts might well have received Tom Brown’s School Days, hero-worshipping the nice-but-dim sporting English gentleman.

Miller became an important collector of Devonian fossil fishes during the 1830s, when these fossils were critical in elucidating the history of life. Yet to say that Miller was a geologist would be like describing Primo Levi as a chemist or Stephen Jay Gould as an evolutionary biologist, for Miller’s other important impact on science was as an inspired populariser. In the Memoir you see the young writer developing the range of styles that later made him so effective: sardonic observation of fellow workers, lyrical descriptions of the Scottish countryside, and just occasionally a romantic, almost Gothic fantasy. He is sometimes a little over the top for modern tastes, and tends to use Biblical expressions that any kirk-going person would have been familiar with then. But Miller’s books sold in their thousands, and must have done much to stimulate support for geology – and all without colour paintings of dinosaurs. They don’t make science writers like that any more.

Amazingly, Miller’s bestselling The Old Red Sandstone and its successors were written in his spare time. His prime occupation was as editor of The Witness, the successful newspaper of the evangelical wing of the Church of Scotland, which eventually resigned en masse in 1843, upset by the imposition of landowners’ right to “intrude” parish ministers against the congregation’s wishes. In a splendid example of democratic bloody-mindedness, it formed an independent Free Church in which Miller was a key figure.

Miller, an independent editor, commented freely, upsetting progressives and reactionaries alike. In the Memoir we can see his developing power of social observation being sharpened by his time as a stonemason, when he often was housed in bothies worse than cow sheds. His later writings on the terrible social effects of the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and the Highland clearances, make Miller a social commentator as important in Scotland as his contemporary William Cobbett was in England.

Cromarty was on the frontier of the Highlands. Miller was fascinated by Gaelic society with its “primitive” emphasis on hospitality and dignity. In one hovel, he was treated not with deference but with courtesy and pity for his ignorance of Gaelic. Miller, that rational Calvinistic geologist and son of a businesslike Lowland sea captain, was influenced by the stories of his Gaelic mother, and saved much folklore for posterity. Alas, the Gaelic spirits were more terrible than effete southern fairies. They may have been the phantoms that drove Miller to suicide in 1856.

Hanham and Shortland argue that nobody quite understood Miller’s life or death, least of all himself. He was a driven man, solitary and shy, who never found peace, but Miller became a great tragic hero of science and Scotland.

Here are potted introductions to the main time periods, and illustrated descriptions of the 50 or so selected sites and their beasties, all in A4 format (though there are a few hiccups with the museum codes, and a few marine reptile illustrations seem erroneously captioned). This isn’t a popular book nor yet a picture album. But anyone concerned with site preservation, perhaps in a group overseeing local sites under the Regionally Important Geological Sites scheme, will want to check it.

But, collectors beware: the book is not a field guide and mention of a site does not indicate that it is open to visitors, let alone collectors – often the reverse. The book doesn’t say which sites have actually been protected as SSSIs, let alone whether collecting is permitted (often a matter for the landowner). Final designation rests with Scottish Natural Heritage, the Countryside Council for Wales, or English Nature. These exclusions aren’t as serious as they seem, because SSSI status and land ownership are fluid and often unresolved, and a reptile site not included here may yet gain SSSI status for, say, fossil fishes or sediment structures.

Many readers will go for this book because of a side effect. Benton and Spencer’s trawl of centuries of geological literature up to 1994 and museum collections from Elgin to Exeter has created something approaching, though not quite achieving, a master guide for British (but not Irish) fossil reptiles and their sites – and not just the key sites but also those rejected for official recognition. I say “not quite”: the treatment is necessarily uneven, simply because the book’s prime object is to identify sites with “potential for future finds”. So papers on the history of geology are mostly ignored except when they relate to specific sites.

Sites that have not yet achieved recommendation as SSSIs, and their fossils, are, nevertheless, listed and sometimes briefly discussed, usually with some further references to give you a head start in the library. Here are those prolific Victorian local quarries, hand-worked to yield fossils in abundance, now filled in and replaced by today’s centralised superpits. More surprisingly, a few hugely productive sites such as the Oxford Clay brick pits of Peterborough and Bletchley, rich in marine reptiles, weren’t selected as SSSIs: their unstable clay faces would seemingly be impossible to preserve if active extraction were to stop.

Anyone interested in prehistoric saurians will have a serendipitous wander through Fossil Reptiles of Great Britain, which goes beyond the wretchedly overexposed dinosaurs in its systematic revelation of the full wealth of our fossil record: here, for instance, are Dorset’s plesiosaurs, the Isle of Wight’s turtles, Scottish desert-dwellers, and Triassic tuataras from fossil Welsh caves. It’s all a tribute to British workers past and present and their museums, large and small – at least those that survived – which gave the world the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and dinosaur. Meanwhile, new finds like Baryonyx (aka the Surrey Dinosaur or “Claws”, whose place of discovery is included) remind us that the potential is far from exhausted. Amazing what one can do with a humble quarry.

It will be a revelation to many how, not content with “dinosaurs”, Hawkins, Owen and their colleagues planned just about every then-known fossil saurian and mammal big enough to be embodied in iron, concrete, rubber, brick and tile. As a marine reptile specialist, I thoroughly approve of this particular Victorian value, although their commercial managers evidently did not, cutting off funding somewhere about the giant armadillo.

The authors dwell lovingly on each member of this extraordinary bestiary: the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and crocodiles wallowing in the lake, the pterodactyls perching on the rocks, the giant sloth embracing its now-dead tree, the humbug-striped tapir-like palaeotherium, and more. Their creators pushed their luck too far at times, but then so do dinosaur reconstructors today. Mosasaurus, then known from little more than a head, was conveniently portrayed emerging from the lake, coyly hiding its body, but the equally poorly known dicynodont and labyrinthodont came a cropper, with turtle-and-toad-like bodies respectively.

One arguable omission is a clearer explanation of how the total “Geological Illustrations” incorporated not just reconstructed animals but also fabricated rocky outcrops, the odd coal seam, cave and even lead mine, to represent the British sequence of geological strata. So, for example, the “Secondary Island” really was ornamented with “secondary” – that is, Mesozoic – rocks, an appropriate back-drop for Mesozoic saurians. Sadly, the scheme was never completed and what had been constructed was later partly destroyed by attempts at landscaping the park in 1962. Providing the key geo-logical concepts of context and sequence, without which the animals were so many cherries without a cake, the scheme is well explained by Peter Doyle and Eric Robinson’s complementary (and, by Sod’s law, near-simultaneous) article (Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, vol 104, pp 181-194) which gives much fuller references than the book’s skimpy listing (see also vol 106, pp 71-78).

Rightly indignant that the tale of their beloved monsters remained untold to the general public, McCarthy and Gilbert have produced an affectionate tribute, A4-sized with lots of pictures old and new, splendidly sententious Victorian quotes, and plenty of anecdotes, covering such things as dinosaur merchandising 1850s style (strictly educational), and the famous dinner party “inside” the iguanodon (apparently in the mould, and partly outside at that). These plus points have to be weighed against an uneven quality of production: patchy editing; some murky photographs; and several unconvincing “modern reconstructions”. Nevertheless, this is the only reasonably complete popular account: anyone visiting the park or wanting an armchair trip there will need it to make due obeisance to the beasties and their creators.

Vestiges gallops from the formation of the Solar System to the co-evolution of life with the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. For example, the sequestration of carbon dioxide in coal and limestone allowed the advent of higher forms such as mammals. It was all sequentially programmed, as if the creator booted up the cosmos at creation and let it run, or, as Robert Chambers put it when talking about embryonic development, “like Mr Babbage programming his Engine”.

Chambers then outlined the evidence – behavioural, anatomical, anthropological, linguistic and so on – for the unity of human races and their common origin from animals. Rather than being specially created to occupy Eden, we have been implicit all along in the great plan of things: the culmination of a great linear progress. After Darwin, we know Chambers was wrong about this, but he deserves full credit for first publicising the basic idea of evolution.

Vestiges went down badly with the establishment, social and religious. After all, natural evolution implied social evolution and the dissolution of the social status quo. And, if humans had evolved from apes, did apes also have souls? The religious reactionaries were also upset by Chambers’s exhortation to forget divine intervention: that would be tinkering with the great progressive experiment let loose so long ago.

Actually, Vestiges is touchingly moral, portraying a healthy natural existence as hard work and a happy family life (although Chambers may have merely been adding a pinch of sugar to sweeten the anticlerical poison). Progressive bourgeois found this cosmic perspective infinitely more acceptable than earlier evolutionary ideas stemming from the French Revolution. However, this “Victorian value” was simply in the old Scots tradition of self-improvement. Chambers himself, with his brother William, climbed from poverty to found a huge publishing firm, W. & R. Chambers. The first and perhaps greatest of science journalists, Chambers edited the enormously successful Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, full of improving and useful stuff for the middle-class family and intelligent working person.

Modern readers will be startled by the hall-of-mirrors distorting effect of Chamber’s writing thanks to the scientific background being so different from today’s (The Fontana History of the Environmental by Peter Bowler is helpful here). Basic “facts” like geological timescales are almost unrecognisable and old errors present. The electrically generated mites are especially splendid. These “errors” have given Vestiges an infamous reputation with later readers, but they weren’t (usually) the fault of Chambers, who was pretty accurately reporting current science.

But forget Chambers for the moment if you want to appreciate the impact of Vestiges. Fear of boycott made him publish anonymously, and this redoubled the book’s punch. Disoriented readers, who could no longer prejudge, had to read the thing.

Read it, too, as a scientifically ignorant Victorian. Vestiges is often unfairly dismissed as a bodged Origin of Species. Rather, as well as having his own ideas about evolution, Chambers set out astounding new ideas in the first popular book also aimed at scientists. He wrote about life, the Universe and everything, especially how we got here – the answer of course being “development” (Chambers’s word for evolution). Today’s A Brief History of Time right through to Wonderful Life, The Red Queen and The Language Instinct are the heirs of Vestiges, while it drew enough reactionary venom to make it safe for the Origin of Species to appear.

Chambers and Vestiges have been almost forgotten in this 150th anniversary year, but this reissue is a fine commemoration. James Secord, who has written an excellent and insightful introduction, rightly chose the first and historically most significant edition. The new facsimile edition includes the sequel Explanations, in which Chambers answered technical criticisms, and several minor pieces and listings of editions and reviews. Vestiges isn’t by any means homogenised modern pap, but if you are fascinated by Victorian novelists or want to see what the Universe looked like 150 years ago, then Vestiges offers a new insight.

This unpretentious paperback has 34 quizzes, each of 30 questions with
answers: a mixture of plain query, multiple choice, spelling bee, anagram,
odd-one-out and identify-the-drawing. If you can answer 95 per cent of the
questions, you are doing very well. But don’t expect anyone to answer 100
per cent correctly because a few of the answers are wrong.

This is partly because there is no such thing as the answer. As the
author cheerfully admits, dinosaur ‘answers’ are never as clear as, say,
the result of the 1992 FA Cup Final, thanks to researchers’ differing opinions.

Occasional oversimplifications also occur, for example, crocodiles occasionally
use erect gait, many pregnant ichthyosaurs are known, and ichnology is not
just about footprints. Less excusable are a couple of ambiguous questions
– did Mary Anning find a, or the (first?), Ichthyosaurus? And a few are
plain wrong. Anning and Darwin were not ‘dinosaur persons’, and dinosaurs
are pests in at least one coal mine (their footprints stick down from the
roof and tend to fall off).

If you like dinosaurs and Trivial Pursuit, this cheap and cheerful tome
will suit you, but don’t take too seriously the claim that it’s highly educational.

Michael Taylor is curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the National
Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh.

*18 Adelaide Street, Stamford, Lincolnshire PE9 2EN.

Chris McGowan would have enjoyed my sunny October Sunday at the Shuttleworth
Collection’s aerodrome near Bedford, watching the Spitfire taking off from
the slightly bumpy grass. But my favourite, the Bristol Boxkite, came out
in the evening calm and took off for a sedate circuit of the field at all
of 50-odd miles per hour, its 1910-vintage wire-braced double wings and
tailplane resembling a disconcertingly slow-flying hencoop.

It’s not just that the Boxkite seems so archaic; it was one of a set
of replicas built for a film. In the classic Building Aeroplanes for ‘Those
Magnificent Men’ (Foulis, pp 95, 1965) Allen Wheeler explained how he and
his colleagues combined the actual physical evidence of the airframes and
plans with a detailed understanding of aerodynamics and engineering, as
well as the odd piece of apparently irrelevant detail that might turn out
to be vital. In the case of the plane that refused to take off, it took
some time for the builders to realise that the original owner-captain had
been exceptionally small, and forthwith recruited a petite female pilot.

This, as McGowan shows, is precisely what good palaeontologists do when
reconstructing the biology of their fossil animals. For all the past 20
years’ explosion in research of fossil reptiles, we still don’t know that
much for sure, even about living animals. Inferences have to be qualified,
and are heavily based upon analogies with living animals and on basic physical
laws.

At times, especially if you pick it up and start in the middle, McGowan’s
book seems as rambling as Tristram Shandy. But this shaggy-dogginess is
deceptive, however much it simulates the progress of the average PhD student.
It’s an accurate reflection of the eclectic assortment of evidence needed,
as well as the historical factors involved. A marine tetrapod’s derivation
from a reptile or mammal controls whether it hunts by sight as the ichthyosaurs
did, or by sonar as dolphins do. Of course, Laurence Sterne’s book was all
about historical contingency affecting his hero’s life – not that far removed
from palaeobiology.

McGowan’s discussion of sauropod dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus (formerly
brontosaurus) thus covers such things as the habits of elephants, the dynamics
of walking, the implications of gigantism for feeding and thermoregulation,
and the long neck’s effect on blood pressure (the heart of a really high
sauropod would have burst when the neck was lifted high, unless the blood
flow was temporarily shut down).

We get a selection of other dinosaurs, and then by far the most extensive
discussion of ichthyosaurs in any popular book, including their swimming,
feeding, senses, breeding habits and diversity – though even then they all
look almost the same, thanks to the tyranny imposed by the physical requirements
of being an active swimmer. What will seem to some an inordinately deep
discussion of the minutiae of tail-fin function is in fact an excellent
example of the agonising that underlies even the most mildly authoritative
conclusion.

McGowan also discusses how pterosaurs walked and flew, still matters
of controversy, while the role of historical contingency is symbolised by
the ongoing controversy about the end-Cretaceous mass extinctions.

Dinosaurs, Spitfires and Sea Dragons originated in McGowan’s earlier
The Successful Dragons (1982), but it is so completely updated and revised
as to be virtually a new book, with improved design and presentation. Nevertheless,
the book’s format remains text with supplementary illustrations. This is
fair enough, but there are definitely places, such as the discussion of
jaw mechanics of hadrosaurs, where just a few further labels or illustrations
are needed.

There is a fairly full reference list, and I found more than one useful
item for my own research here. Unfortunately – and this is my main complaint
– McGowan gives no list of selected reading more available to the average
reader than the specialist journals which form the bulk of the citations,
at least unless you join the Geologists’ Association or a similar society
and gain access to the library.

He has certainly found a new niche in what sometimes seems a hopelessly
overcrowded dinosaur book market, not just because of the ichthyosaurs,
but also because of its adult, reasonable, amiably balanced, and correctly
open-ended approach to how we really develop our ideas about them. McGowan’s
book is not an encyclopedia or a full discussion of the entire diversity
of the fossils involved, except pleasingly, the ichthyosaurs, neglected
by almost everyone else. After all, there are plenty of superbly illustrated
books about fossil saurians but few if any which discuss the assumptions
underlying our ideas.

Apart from Robert Bakker’s polemic (and so inherently biased) The Dinosaur
Heresies (Longman, pp 482, ÂŁ18.50, 1987; Penguin, pp 482, ÂŁ9.99
pbk, 1988), the nearest competitor has to be Robert McNeill Alexander’s
Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants, which discusses much the
same topics and groups, but with rather less biological background. McGowan’s
book is much larger for much the same price, but its intended audience obviously
dislikes physical equations, whose omission makes the discussion that much
looser but more readable (though one unfortunate lapse seems to confuse
mass and weight).

Faced with an undergraduate class in saurian engineering, I prefer Alexander
as a stricter introduction to the physics involved, but I push McGowan’s
book for broader background reading as well as bedside and bathtime (where
better for thought experiments on ichthyosaur biomechanics?) Not a children’s
book, this, but highly recommended for any thoughtful adult and older teenager
wanting to know the nature of palaeontological knowledge, and not frightened
of finding that the jury is still out on their pet question. Who knows,
it may inspire more than one future researcher.

Michael Taylor is assistant keeper (curatorial) at Leicestershire Museums
Service, where he gets more thoroughly confused the more he looks at marine
reptile mechanics.