SOURCE: Merrill, Lynn L. “Hugh Miller and Evocative Geology.” In The Romance of Victorian Natural History, pp. 236-54. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Where can be seen an intenser delight than that of children picking up new flowers and watching new insects, or hoarding pebbles and shells? … Every botanist who has had children with him in the woods and the lanes must have noticed how eagerly they joined him in his pursuits, how keenly they searched out plants for him, how intently they watched while he examined them, how they overwhelmed him with questions. … Having gained due familiarity with the simpler properties of inorganic objects, the child should by the same process be led on to a like exhaustive examination of the things it picks up in its daily walks, the less complex facts they present being alone noticed at first: in plants, the color, number and forms of the petals and shapes of the stalks and leaves; in insects, the numbers of the wings, legs, and antennae, and their colors. As they become fully appreciated and invariably observed, further facts may be successively introduced.¹

Herbert Spencer, “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical,” 1861

In the natural history prose of Philip Henry Gosse and Charles Kingsley, several common traits display themselves repeatedly: particularity of details, fascination with natural facts, vivification of nature whether organic or not, imaginative journeys through apertures of scale, and joy in nature's boundless variety. But the two naturalists were friends, and both took much of their pleasure at the seaside. Is it merely for those reasons that their works exhibit definite stylistic similarities? On the contrary, the language used by Gosse and Kingsley expresses common Victorian responses to natural history. They are not isolated eccentrics, but type specimens of the naturalist species. Their natural history discourse is thoroughly representative. This becomes clear if one looks at other writers completely outside the Gosse-Kingsley mold.

For example, The Old Red Sandstone: or, New Walks in an Old Field, by the Scots geologist Hugh Miller (1802-1856), takes its natural history rambles in an entirely different realm from that treated by The Romance of Natural History, Evenings at the Microscope, or Glaucus. Nevertheless, within what at first appears to be an unpromising area of inquiry—one dusty stratum or formation of ancient rock—Miller discovers many of the same rewards that lured Gosse and Kingsley to marine biology and microscopy. And in its prose, although somewhat more scientific and theoretical than Gosse's or Kingsley's, The Old Red Sandstone exploits many of the same motifs and devices.

Miller's book is worth looking at, first of all, simply as a cultural phenomenon. Published in 1841 (in book form), The Old Red Sandstone became a best-seller almost immediately. Lynn Barber, who devotes a chapter of her natural history survey to Miller, declares that after 1841 “Miller's name was known in every Victorian parlour.”² She quotes Archibald Geikie, the geologist, as saying that Miller's books “were to be found in the remotest log-hut of the Far West, and on both sides of the Atlantic ideas of the nature and shape of geology were largely drawn from them.”³ Certainly references to Miller abound in the books by other naturalists; indeed, he takes on the status of a sort of Olympian god of natural history. Charles Kingsley mentions Miller several times in Glaucus, praising The Old Red Sandstone as the best possible example of “induction learnt from a narrow field of objects.”⁴ And Herbert Spencer, while maintaining in 1861 that “science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it,” cites Miller as a prime practitioner of poetic science.⁵

Hugh Miller rose to such prominence for several reasons. First, he was a self-taught, working-class geologist who learned the science while toiling away at hard labor in stone quarries; such successes of working-class diligence of course appealed to the Victorians. (Recall how fond Kingsley and Samuel Smiles were of praising self-taught naturalists, such as Smiles' biographical subjects, Thomas Edward and Robert Dick.) Second, Miller, curiously enough, was a devoted Christian naturalist, just like Gosse and Kingsley. His was a geology wholly consistent with Christian doctrine. In the disturbing world of post-Lyellian geology, Miller's Old Red Sandstone “charmed everyone with the beauty and vigor of its knowledgeable creationist assertions,” long after most geologists had renounced creationist ideas.⁶ Two other Miller works were even more reassuring: Footprints of the Creator (1849) and The Testimony of the Rocks (1857). Third, Hugh Miller, the humble Scotsman, inherited the mantle of geologic glory from Charles Lyell, keeping geology before the public during the 1840s.⁷ This was the decade when Adam Sedgwick became influential and when Ruskin advocated the study of geological landscapes in Modern Painters; these were “years of triumph” for geology.⁸ Busily opening up vistas of vanished worlds, geologists, or more specifically paleontologists, were creating a sensation for the reading public. As Charles Kingsley maintained in Glaucus,

it is a question whether Natural History would have ever attained its present honors, had not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination.⁹

Miller's fame rode on just such “vast and awful” speculations.

Finally, Hugh Miller became one of the most beloved of Victorian naturalists because of the power of his style. Among his peers, the naturalists and geologists of his day, Miller was held in high esteem, both for the thoroughness of his knowledge and for the gracefulness of his descriptions. Roderick Murchison called his style “beautiful and poetical,” and William Buckland claimed that he “would give his left hand to possess such powers of description as this man.”¹⁰ Twentieth-century critics who deal with Miller agree. Lynn Barber calls Miller's style “lucid,” full of apt similes,¹¹ and Julian M. Drachman goes so far as to proclaim that Miller “was one of the very finest literary masters who have ever undertaken to write on scientific subjects.”¹²

It is true that in some sections of The Old Red Sandstone Miller's style is gripping; some of his descriptions of landscape are Ruskinian in intensity, and his imaginative recreations of past eras are vivid. But frankly, for the modern reader, The Old Red Sandstone is a daunting book. Packed with lengthy notes, figures, lists, and technical details of fossil fish anatomy, Miller's book makes for heavy slogging. I cannot agree with Lynn Barber, who says that “reading it today, one can still understand why” Sandstone “was a best-seller.”¹³ On the contrary, I find it difficult to picture large numbers of people enjoying many sections of the book. The really interesting question about The Old Red Sandstone is not why the descriptive set-pieces appealed to people, but why even the seemingly tedious technical portions appealed. I would suggest this explanation: that the exhaustive technical descriptions in chapter after chapter of the book, those that to a modern eye seem numbing in their detail, were embraced by Victorian readers as a fabulous treasure-store of material facts. The Old Red Sandstone captivated the Victorian imagination, in part, because it fairly bristled with particulars.

In the context of nineteenth-century natural history, of course, ever-multiplying particulars were a never-ending source of delight. To Lewes, Gosse, Kingsley, and so many others, particulars were the emblems of nature's unlimited bounty, best appreciated by the sharp, focused eye, the eye of literal or figurative microscopic vision. Miller, in fact, employs this aid, saying of the ichthyolites in his favorite formation that it does not “lessen the wonder that their nicer ornaments should yield their beauty only to the microscope.”¹⁴ And, like other naturalists of his time, Miller made a conscious attempt to refine his sight. He reports that after some practice he has “now learned to look at rocks with another eye” (p. 129), and notes also how, in making collections of rock, “the eye becomes practised in such researches” (p. 132), making his labors pay off. Like other naturalists, Miller becomes obsessed with the multiplicity of nature—that close examination of nature will yield more and more details that can be brought to light. When Miller realizes that nodules within the Old Red Sandstone formation have fossils inside them, he breaks open all he can find, until they are, in his words, “laid open”:

I set myself carefully to examine. The first nodule I laid open contained a bituminous-looking mass, in which I could trace a few pointed bones and a few minute scales. The next abounded in rhomboidal and finely-enamelled scales, of much larger size and more distinct character. I wrought on with the eagerness of a discoverer entering for the first time a terra incognita of wonders. Almost every fragment of clay, every splinter of sandstone, every limestone nodule, contained its organism,—scales, spines, plates, bones, entire fish …

(p. 130)

Here is the same sense of wonder, and the same delight in minuteness, that one finds in Gosse and so many other Victorian naturalists.

Since Miller perceives dusty rocks as a wonderful terra incognita, he takes the value of all he finds within that land for granted. Each fragment, each splinter, each outline and angle and pattern is important. And all these minute details are reported at length—resulting in passages that I think are detailed to a fault. Collecting specimens until “half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone” (p. 57), Miller reports on every characteristic of them. Fossil fish scales, somewhat incredibly, are painstakingly described:

Each scale consists of a double plate,—an inner and an outer. The structure of the inner is not peculiar to the family or the formation: it is formed of a number of concentric circles, crossed by still minuter radiating lines,—the one described, and the other proceeding from a common centre. … All scales that receive their accessions of growth equally at their edges exhibit internally a corresponding character. The outer plate presents an appearance less common. It seems relieved into ridges that drop adown it like sculptured threads, some of them entire, some broken, some straight, some slightly waved …

(p. 99)

The effect of page after page of such description can well be imagined.

Two points should be made about the passage quoted above. The first is that, obviously, structural examination of fish scales belongs more to the province of science than to that of natural history. The Old Red Sandstone is a mixture of both. Far more than Glaucus or The Romance of Natural History, Miller's book aims to understand the laws governing its subject. It is often quite theoretical, speculating about geological causes and effects: Why did this species disappear? How did this come to be so well fossilized? In fact, Miller's book survives today mostly for geologists who appreciate its contribution to the geological understanding of an important stratigraphic member.¹⁵

The second point to be made about the passage is that Miller's technical descriptions frequently metamorphose into evocative descriptions. Far from being a dispassionate scientist, Miller displays an appreciation for the aesthetic features of minutiae that rivals even that of Gosse or Kingsley. Thus Miller's work, as its emphasis on microscopic vision and collecting indicates, also fits within the definition of natural history I have suggested.

While seeking to comprehend them, Miller nonetheless sees the fossils as quite beautiful, and portrays them as such. And although the quoted passage is mostly technical and devoid of emotion, toward the end it begins to exhibit Miller's sense of beauty, expressed in his typical figurative language. The outer plate of the scale has ridges “like sculptured threads,” the implication being that they are not only minutely detailed—some straight and some wavy—but also that they are finely wrought, like tiny works of art. Other passages from The Old Red Sandstone make more explicit Miller's perception of beauty. One fossil fish, Diplacanthus, has “spines” on its fins, which “are of singular beauty” (p. 112). Besides their singularity, so esteemed in Victorian natural history, they each resemble “a bundle of rods, or rather, like a Gothic column, the sculptured semblance of a bundle of rods.” Again, these curious objects are perceived as valuable natural works of art.

Another fish, the Osteolepis, turns up in the sandstone breathtakingly preserved as fossils that are also works of art. (Yet while giving the reader an aesthetic appreciation of the fossils, Miller is equally concerned with giving accurate scientific details, such as correct species names—often obtained in consultation with other experts, such as Agassiz or Murchison.) Osteolepis is a completely armored fish, sporting “plaited mail” on its head, “scaly mail” on its body, and fins with “mail of parallel and jointed bars” (p. 115). Likening the scales to armored mail is one Gossean touch, but Miller goes even further, stating that the “entire suit glittered with enamel.” And that striking enamel is rife with detail, since “every plate, bar, and scale, was dotted with microscopic points.” These points, or dots, remind Miller of the “circular perforations in a lace veil,” an exquisite example of artistry.

Moving on to the next type of fish, the Cheirolepis, Miller finds that “an entirely different style obtains” (p. 115). In these fossils, Miller finds that

the enamelled scales and plates glitter with minute ridges, that show like thorns in a December morning varnished with ice. Every ray of the fins presents its serrated edge; every occipital plate and bone its sculptured prominences; every scale its bunch of prickle-like ridges.

Whereas the first species of fossil presented, to the magnified vision, an effect “of lightness and beauty,” the Cheirolepis appears more formidable. Miller succeeds at imbuing the primitive, ancient creature with a savage life; one can vividly imagine this glittering armored fish swimming in mysterious seas. And significantly, every detail of the fossil, if examined closely, generates more details: the fin has rays, which in turn have serrated edges, and so on.

The joyful discovery of particularities within particularities runs throughout The Old Red Sandstone. Learning to see ever more precise details of rocks and fossils has a scientific point, since the details facilitate classification and therefore understanding, but compiling them partakes of the old-fashioned pleasures of natural history. And since nature's variety is endless, there is always more to see. For example, while poking around in broken rock that contains the fossil fish, Cephalaspis, Miller notes that

some of the specimens which exhibit this creature are exceedingly curious. In one a coprolite still rests in the abdomen; and a common botanist's microscope shows it thickly speckled over with minute scales, the indigestible exuviae of fish on which the animal had preyed. In the abdomen of another we find a few minute pebbles, … which had been swallowed by the creature attached to its food.

(p. 77)

In part, these details are “wonderful” because they enable “us” (like Gosse, Kingsley, and so many other Victorian naturalists, Miller uses the first-person plural pronoun as a means of including the reader and dramatizing the hunt) to understand how these ancient fish lived. But the minute scales inside the coprolite, inside the stomach, inside the abdomen, inside the Cephalaspis, again reveal the naturalist's pleasantly dizzy sensation of confronting details that recede to infinity.

Geology and paleontology (or “oryctology,” the older name that Miller uses, p. 136) add the dimension of time to the naturalist's contemplation of objects scattered throughout space, and for this reason, Miller says, “geology, of all the sciences, addresses itself most powerfully to the imagination” (p. 57). What Miller calls the “wonders of geology” appeal to us because they “exercise every faculty of the mind,—reason, memory, imagination” (p. 119). God's infinite variety in nature, where truth is always more wonderful than fiction, is revealed to the geologist in layers of time, each containing objects infinitely individuated. Miller at one point in his researches worries that the teeth of one fish he describes are too bizarre to be believed. His colleague Louis Agassiz reassures him:

Do not be deterred, if you have examined minutely, by any dread of being deemed extravagant. The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant, that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for nature to realize.

(p. 78)

This is the faith of the naturalist: optimism about nature's endless extravagance.

Miller always keeps before the reader the motif of discovery. He speaks of himself as a “sort of Robinson Crusoe of geology” (p. 137). In part, he means that he was cut off from professional contacts for years, because of his class, but Miller is a Robinson Crusoe of geology also in the sense that he has a whole new world to explore in the layers of the Old Red Sandstone. What he finds in that world is, invariably, an “amazing multiplicity of being” (p. 227), “myriads” of creatures and forms that are “innumerable” and “multitudinous.” The realm that he has stumbled upon is rich beyond comprehension: one two-mile section of shoreline bounded by the Old Red Sandstone is so complex that “years of examination and inquiry would fail to exhaust it” (p. 209). Since the lost world now represented by the Old Red Sandstone is dauntingly intricate, Miller opens his account of it with a personal anecdote that shows how he came to it in all innocence and ignorance and gradually learned about it. The lesson—quite overtly stated—is that the reader can, too.

The opening chapter of Miller's book invites one to begin a voyage of discovery. The very first sentence is Miller's “advice to young working men desirous of bettering their circumstances”; they should not bother with what “is misnamed pleasure” (presumably drinking and the like) but rather pursue “study” (p. 33). Putting faith in the chimera of Chartism in hopes of gaining the right to vote, says Miller, is a waste of time. How much better to “learn to make right use of your eyes: the commonest things are worth looking at,—even stones and weeds, and the most familiar animals.” Heeding this familiar naturalist's injunction will lead to happiness. Miller can attest to that with a “simple narrative” (p. 35) of his own life. Twenty years ago he had gone off to work in a stone quarry, fearful about the rigors of such a life. Almost immediately, however, this healthful outdoor labor opens Miller's eyes to the world around him. He notices birds, the “prospect” around him, clear air, a waveless bay, and pleasant wooded slopes.

Most important of all, Miller discovers what is hidden inside some of the rocks being quarried:

In the course of the first day's employment I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture—one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital.

(p. 39)

Amazed, he wondered: “Was there another such curiosity in the whole world?” He soon realizes that the entire area of sedimentary deposits around the quarry is “a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied in even my dreams” (p. 40). The layers of rock are, Miller realizes, like leaves in a book or “a herbarium,” with “the pictorial records of a former creation in every page” (p. 40). Paging through this book of nature, the incipient geologist finds himself

lost in admiration and astonishment, … my very imagination paralysed by an assemblage of wonders that seemed to outrival in the fantastic and the extravagant even its wildest conceptions.

(p. 41)

Brought face to face with this “assemblage of wonders,” Miller embarks on a voyage of discovery through time and space. Unlike Wallace or Bates, Miller did not need to journey to remote jungles of Malaysia or the Amazon to encounter natural curiosities; they are amply entombed in the rock beneath his feet. He thinks of himself ever after as a typical rambling naturalist, picking up flotsam from the shore, saying of his life: “I have been an explorer of caves and ravines, a loiterer along sea-shores, a climber among rocks, a labourer in quarries. My profession was a wandering one” (p. 42). Interestingly, when Miller finds his first belemnite fossil (part of an extinct cuttle-fish), he compares it to a strange stone brought home by a relative from Java; both are exotic curios, but Miller's exotic locale is the ordinary landscape of Britain.

After opening thus on a personal note, The Old Red Sandstone proceeds to the enumeration of countless scales, ribs, prickles, tubercules, spines, fins, and bones of vanished fish. Chapter after chapter catalogues these features, but they are enlivened by similes and fresh metaphors—spines that “run deep into the body, as a ship's masts run deep into her hulk” (p. 113), a Coccosteus shaped either like “a boy's kite” or like an “ancient one-sided shovel which we see sculptured on old tombstones” (p. 74), or the head-plates of a fish that are “burnished like ancient helmets” (p. 98). Along with the details of specimens, Miller includes extremely precise descriptions of geological strata and rock types, since they are the sets against which the fish—the “dramatis personae” (p. 65) of the story—come alive. Miller himself realizes that the thoroughness of his report may overwhelm the unsuspecting reader: “I am particular, at the risk, I am afraid, of being tedious, in thus describing the geology of this northern country” (p. 56). He continues to be particular because the truth of his subject only exists in particulars. Only if one can amass all the facts can one discover the truth about them.

The facts—fragments of fish, plants, and other organisms—are strewn throughout the Old Red Sandstone and its attendant rocks like pieces of a puzzle. Miller is fond of telling stories of how those pieces have been reconstructed, and their meaning deciphered. He applauds Cuvier as a master of the craft of reconstructing bits of bone; they were to him clear “signs,” though “incomprehensible to every one else” (p. 153). The current master of the art, though, is the ichthyologist whom Miller unabashedly reveres: Louis Agassiz. Miller tells the dramatic story of how Agassiz daringly reconstructed “the huge crustacean of Balruddery.” Murchison, Buckland, and several other authorities had been baffled by the collection of “fragments of scaly rhombs, of scaly crescents, of scaly circles, with scaly parallelograms attached to them.” No one would “hazard a conjecture” about their nature (p. 154).

Agassiz, however, “glanced over the collection” with a masterful eye. One strange specimen stood out; “his eye brightened as he contemplated it” (p. 154). Miller dramatically recounts Agassiz's revelation:

“I will tell you,” he said, turning to the company,—“I will tell you what these are,—the remains of a huge lobster.” He arranged the specimens in the group before him with as much apparent ease as I have seen a young girl arranging the pieces of ivory or mother-of-pearl in an Indian puzzle. A few broken pieces completed the lozenge-shaped shield; two detached specimens placed on its opposite sides furnished the claws; two or three semi-rings with serrated edges composed the jointed body; the compound figure, which but a minute before had so strongly attracted his attention, furnished the terminal flap; and there lay the huge lobster before us, palpable to all.

(pp. 154, 156)

The scene radiates the joy of discovery and conveys the incredible sensation of having an extinct and hardly even suspected animal loom up suddenly, “palpable to all.” Agassiz solves the puzzle with exceptional skill, but Miller's description of the problem as being an “Indian puzzle” is not unusual. Like most Victorian naturalists, he perceives nature as a mosaic made up of infinite pieces, which fit together in surprising ways. Miller finds such surprises everywhere he looks, albeit usually without such theatrical fanfare. Who but Miller, or another Victorian naturalist perhaps, would take the trouble to count, and then recount for a reader, how many fossil organisms reside in “a single cubic inch” of shale from the Eathie Lias? Miller had the patience to tally there “about eighty molluscous organisms, mostly ammonites, and minute striated scallops” (p. 194).

Gradually, Hugh Miller shifts his focus away from the particularities of the fish and other fossils and toward the longer view—the scenery, or, as he calls it, the “physiognomy” (p. 201) of landscape. At this point, especially in chapter XI, Miller demonstrates his formidable descriptive powers for scenery. Very much like the Ruskin and Gosse passages with which I ended Chapter 6, Miller's descriptions of scenery depend on a hypothetical traveler who walks through the varying countryside. One long passage illustrates how differing rock types affect the manifestation of terrain. At first, “the traveller passes through a mountainous region of gneiss” (p. 201). Here the hills are “bulky” but “shapeless,” and somewhat somber: they “raise their huge backs so high over the brown dreary moors” that stretch away at their feet. The traveler then “pursues his journey” and

enters a district of micaceous schist. The hills are no longer truncated, or the moors unbroken: the heavy ground-swell of the former landscape has become a tempestuous sea, agitated by powerful winds and conflicting tides. The picturesque and somewhat fantastic outline is composed of high sharp peaks, bold craggy domes, steep broken acclivities, and deeply serrated ridges; and the higher hills seem as if set round with a framework of props and buttresses, that stretch out on every side like the roots of an ancient oak.

(p. 202)

Noteworthy here, as in the selections from Gosse and Ruskin, is the energy invested in the landforms. They seem almost to have life—the gneiss hills raising their backs and the mica hills moving as if agitated by inner anxiety. The animation of the landscape is accompanied by formal precision; Miller is careful to tell that the ridges are “deeply serrated,” and that the acclivities are “steep” and “broken.”

From the mica landscape, the traveler “passes on, and the landscape varies” (p. 202). At times the hills become “naked skeletons,” sterile and foreboding. Other rocks shape the landscape into soft, swelling forms, over which streams “linger.” These differences Miller characterizes as “styles” (p. 202) of scenery, each with its own “peculiarities” (p. 204). Miller's schema is reminiscent of Ruskin in Modern Painters; Miller also notes the slaty crystalline rocks and then looks at the resultant landscapes with a painter's eye. It is even reminiscent of Ruskin's attempts, in The Poetry of Architecture, to link human societies and their styles with landscape.

Later in this scenery chapter, Miller guides the geological novice on an exploration of a certain “rocky trench” (p. 210) cut into the sandstone. “Will the reader,” he asks, be willing to devote just a few minutes to walking about in this “solitary recess”? The answer is—of course. “We pass onwards,” then, into the “denuded hollow” (p. 210). The stream-cut ravine is a window into geological time, but Miller equally appreciates the natural profusion of forms that live along the rock. In a passage that would do Ruskin justice—one that Millais would be proud to capture in paint, perhaps as a background for Ophelia's downstream glide—Miller views the undergrowth with an artist's eye:

We enter along the bed of the stream. A line of mural precipices rises on either hand,—here advancing in ponderous overhanging buttresses, there receding into deep damp recesses, tapestried with ivy, and darkened with birch and hazel. A powerful spring, charged with lime, comes pouring by a hundred different threads over the rounded brow of a beetling crag, and the decaying vegetation around it is hardening into stone. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assuming in succession all the various combinations of form that constitute the wild and picturesque; and the pale hues of the stone seem, when brightened by the sun, the very tints a painter would choose to heighten the effect of his shades, or to contrast most delicately with the luxuriant profusion of bushes and flowers that wave over the higher shelves and crannies.

(p. 211)

This is a natural tangle that seems an example of Carlylean “Natural Supernaturalism,” because every element within the description seems alive or sensitive, in most cases fairly bursting with energy. The spring is “powerful,” “charged,” and does not merely flow but “comes pouring” over the rock. The buttresses “advance” and “overhang” the visitor. The crag has a “brow” like a face, and it “beetles” overhead.

Besides being vibrant, the seemingly small slice of scenery is visually crowded and complex. The stream moves through a “hundred” little channels, the cliffs constantly “vary their outline,” and overlapping, changeable hues of dappled light and shade cover the stone. The cliff face is riddled with crannies, in which grow countless bushes and flowers. Miller continues his artist's metaphors, since the precipices seem to him “murals” and the luxuriant vegetation forms “tapestries.” The very stone itself has chosen the exact “tints a painter would choose.” How like Ruskin—who, in a famous “word painting” passage from Modern Painters IV (part V, chapter XI, section 6), notes how in one scene “on the broken rocks of the foreground … the mosses seem to set themselves consentfully and deliberately to the task of producing the most exquisite harmonies of colour in their power.” The mosses “gather over” the rock “in little brown bosses, like small cushions of velvet made of mixed threads of dark ruby silk.” Ruskin, too, looks at nature and sees a preexistent work of art, here mosses forming a beautifully “embroidered” cushion.

Miller continues his description, keeping it charged with a nearly personified energy. The banks become “steeper and more inaccessible,” and the dell “wilder and more deeply wooded.” The stream, restless, “frets and toils at our feet” (p. 211). Flowers multiply in an even “richer profusion … a thick mantling of ivy and honeysuckle.” And the water unceasingly churns “foam, which, flung from the rock, incessantly” revolves in the stream's eddy (p. 212). Just when the rambler begins to feel claustrophobic, even slightly threatened by nature's demonstrated relentless fecundity, Miller changes tactics. “Mark now the geology of the ravine” (p. 212), he instructs. For this lush abundance of nature extends not only throughout the present—in space—but also backwards, throughout time. The rocks themselves, on close inspection, are found to be “a place of sepulture … where the dead lie by myriads” (p. 212). The river “brawls along,” but Miller finds that

it is through a vast burial-yard that it has cut its way,—a field of the dead so ancient, that the sepulchres of Thebes and Luxor are but of the present day in comparison,—resting-places for the recently departed, whose funerals are just over. These mouldering strata are charged with remains, scattered and detached as those of a churchyard, but not less entire in their parts,—occipital bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales,—the dust and rubbish of a departed creation.

(pp. 217-218)

To the consideration of these departed multitudes Miller now turns.

As he opens chapter XII, Miller shifts from the present to the past, attempting to pass “from the dead to the living” (p. 219), and reanimate the fossils now quiescent in the rock. From “consideration of the Old Red Sandstone as it exists in space,” Miller changes to the description of the rock in previous “time,—during the succeeding periods of its formation, and when its existences lived and moved as the denizens of primeval oceans” (p. 219). In this imaginative sweep, the geologist encompasses what Tennyson calls the “terrible Muses,”¹⁶ terrible to think about: the wastes of time and space. Literary Victorians frequently dwelled upon such vastness, as did Carlyle who spoke of the “two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME.” Miller proves himself especially adept at invoking the power of time. In the most famous and most vivid passages of The Old Red Sandstone Miller achieves what Carlyle hoped for in Sartor Resartus: a magician's hat that would enable one to travel backward in time (chapter VIII, book III). As Herr Teufelsdröckh says, “Had we but the Time-annihilating Hat, to put on for once only, we should see ourselves in a World of Miracles.”

A world of miracles, most assuredly, is what Hugh Miller finds. In his mind's eye, the beautiful but static fossils come alive again. For Miller, successive geologic eras become acts within a play; when each is over, the “curtain rises, and the scene is new” (p. 245). Amazingly, with Miller as a guide, the reader is invited to imagine himself walking through the forests of the past, breathing in “the rank stream of decaying vegetation” that “forms a thick blue haze” of “carbonic acid gas” (p. 257). Through the “ancient forest,” Miller confidently says, “we pursue our walk” (p. 249). It is indeed, as Barber maintains, “precisely as a field naturalist setting out on an exploring expedition that he enters the geological past.”¹⁷

The ancient geologic scenes in Hugh Miller's imagination exhibit the same qualities of particularity and boundless variety found in his contemporary landscapes. His assemblage of Silurian organisms is especially striking. These creatures lived in the period before the Old Red Sandstone fish appeared, the period so thoroughly documented by Sir Roderick Murchison in his 1838 scientific tome, The Silurian System. Rocks from the Silurian era show life to have existed on “four distinct platforms,” all of them teeming with multifarious creatures. Miller scans each story of Siluria:

Life abounded on these platforms, and in shapes the most wonderful. The peculiar encrinites of the group rose in miniature forests, and spread forth their sentient petals by millions and tens of millions amid the waters; vast ridges of corals, peopled by their innumerable builders,—numbers without number,—rose high amid the shallows; the chambered shells had become abundant,—the simpler testacea still more so; extinct forms of the graptolite or sea-pen existed by myriads.

(p. 221)

Here no less than in the “denuded hollow” of the stream's ravine, nature teems with wonderfully autonomous forms. Petals are “sentient,” and coral skeletons are “peopled” with living tenants. Everywhere Miller looks, nature is without limits: curious and strange organisms swim and wave by “millions,” “myriads,” “numbers without number.” Life abounds. And even better, nature in its endless multiplication creates enduring monuments, works of meticulous beauty, “in shapes the most wonderful”: chambered shells, vast ridges of coral, miniature petrified forests.

But these creatures pass away, and the history of the Old Red Sandstone period opens, Miller surmises, like the first scene in The Tempest—“amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the wind” (p. 224). Fish take command of the seas, “which literally swarmed with life,” including “miniature forests of algae, and … waters darkened by immense shoals of fish” (p. 226). Mysterious catastrophes at times overtake the ichthyolites. Miller envisions one such period, of disease or volcanic upheaval, and its aftermath:

The period of death passed, and over the innumerable dead there settled a soft muddy sediment, that hid them from the light, bestowing upon them such burial as a November snowstorm bestows on the sere and blighted vegetation of the previous summer and autumn. For an unknown space of time, represented in the formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of animal life. A few scales and plates then begin to appear.

(p. 231)

These dreary, almost incomprehensible wastes of time and death Miller finds awesome to contemplate. The stretches of time are not entirely wastes, however, for nature continues its generation. With the naturalist's faith in variety, as well as the Christian's in God, Miller summarizes the process:

The process went on. Age succeeded age, and one stratum covered up another. Generations lived, died, and were entombed in the ever-growing depositions. Succeeding generations pursued their instincts by myriads, happy in existence, over the surface which covered the broken and perishing remains of their predecessors.

(p. 233)

Not only does God experiment, quite joyously it seems, with “an inexhaustible variety of design expatiated freely within the limits of the ancient type” (p. 233), but the animals themselves, although doomed to perish, enjoy themselves while alive. Like Gosse's microscopic animalcules, they are “happy in existence.”

The assumption of happy fulfillment on the part of each minute creature rescues Miller's contemplation of the ages from despair. The spectacle can continue with its pageantry of form:

The curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded, on an upper platform, by the existences of a later creation. There is sea all around, as before; and we find beneath a dark-coloured muddy bottom, thickly covered by a dwarf vegetation. … Forms of life essentially different career through the green depths, or creep over the ooze. Shoals of Cephalaspides, with their broad arrow-like heads and their slender angular bodies, feathered with fins, sweep past like clouds of cross-bow bolts in an ancient battle. We see the distinct gleam of scales, but the forms are indistinct and dim. … A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions, stalks over the weedy bottom, or burrows in the hollows of the banks.

(p. 245)

Again, the paleontological panorama is graphically animated and convincing, thanks to Miller's characteristic devices: subjective plurality (“we see”), figurative language (“like clouds of cross-bow bolts”), and active, concrete diction. Within a sensory setting, of ooze, a weedy bottom, green light, and gleaming scales, mysterious fish and other creatures “career,” “sweep,” and “stalk.”

With such charged description, Miller succeeds in evoking an air of portentous mystery. Readers feel irresistibly drawn into the remote geological past, as they might be drawn into the jungle of the present by Darwin or Wallace or Bates. In the final few pages of his book, Miller rises to a crescendo of detail and drama, as he imagines the sea receding to make way for the thick vegetable riot on land that will eventually compact into coal. The transition from sea to land Miller achieves by projecting himself into a boat that approaches the shore. He thus conflates a change of time with one of space:

The water is fast shallowing. Yonder passes a broken branch, with the leaves still unwithered; and there floats a tuft of fern. Land, from the masthead! land! land!—a low shore thickly covered with vegetation. Huge trees of wonderful form stand out far into the water. There seems no intervening beach. A thick hedge of reeds, tall as the mast of pinnaces, runs along the deeper bays, like water-flags at the edge of a lake. A river of vast volume comes rolling from the interior, darkening the water for leagues with its slime and mud.

(p. 255)

Here the panoply of botanical forms, on a gigantic scale, is comparable only to deliberate works of art. Trees have “bright and glossy stems” that “seem rodded like Gothic columns,” and their leaves are ranged in tiers, each resembling “a coronal wreath or an ancient crown.”

As usual in Miller's scientific fantasies, the sheer quantity—not to mention diversity—of natural forms astonishes. Like the cubic inch of shale packed with mollusks, the jungle of bygone eons is crammed with curious specimens. The growth of the “vegetable kingdom” displays “amazing luxuriance” (p. 257). Organisms appear, “strangely-formed” (p. 256). Especially odd is one that swoops suddenly into view:

But what monster of the vegetable world comes floating down the stream,—now circling round in the eddies, now dancing on the ripple, now shooting down the rapid? It resembles a gigantic star-fish, or an immense coach-wheel divested of the rim.

(p. 256)

This truly bizarre plant, set off well by Miller's interrogative introduction, looks like some Rotifer or diatom that Philip Gosse might have sighted, but enlarged to monstrous size. Like a gigantic Rotifer, it displays ingenious appurtenances—cylinders, prickles, and “lance-like shoots.”

In fact, one of the most interesting features of Miller's culminating sequence is his mention of the microscope. In O'Brien's story “The Diamond Lens,” the protagonist longed to enter the microscopic world, temporarily deluded into thinking that the beautiful creatures there were compatible with his own size. Likewise, in the example I cited previously from Alfred Russel Wallace, the Malay people became terrified when looking through a microscope, assuming that the insects there illuminated had actually grown gigantic. For Hugh Miller, too, the wonders of nature on a microscopic scale can seem as tangible as those on a normal human scale. Size ranges are even interchangeable:

And then these gigantic reeds!—are they not mere varieties of the common horse-tail of our bogs and morasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulliver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods of twenty years' growth, and lost himself amid a forest of corn fifty feet in height? The lesser vegetation of our own country,—reeds, mosses, and ferns,—seems here as if viewed through a microscope: the dwarfs have sprung up into giants.

(p. 256)

Since the “lesser vegetation” of England did spring up, figuratively, into giants during the Fern Craze, it is appropriate that Miller points out how they literally reigned as giants in the past. The change of scale from gigantic to microscopic actually did take place in this instance. As Kingsley would say, nothing is impossible to nature.

As the author of such powerful passages as these, Hugh Miller captivated Victorian readers. They followed his geological narratives with rapt attention. They were willing even to follow him through the minute intricacies of serrated fish scales, if they were presented as astonishing particularities. So beloved did Miller become that his legions of admirers were stunned to learn that he had died by his own hand. In 1856, the last year of his life, Miller became increasingly agitated and fearful that robbers would break into and despoil his collections. He began to have hallucinations. After one especially terrifying vision, Hugh Miller scribbled a note to his wife saying that he could not bear the horror of his dream; what the horror was, he did not say. Then he shot himself.¹⁸ Perhaps all the sepulchral imagery of his geology books presaged his embrace of death. In any case, the circumstances created a most difficult situation for his admirers: suicide was a sin. A public outcry insisted that Miller be spared that stigma. Was it not unthinkable that such a hero could have deliberately killed himself? Indeed it was. Miller was declared temporarily insane at the time of his death and granted Christian burial.

Hugh Miller advanced the science of geology by his patient research and careful speculation. But he advanced the cause of natural history as well, since geology, his chosen science, was for him preeminently an aesthetic and evocative study. Miller's widow remarked on this in her introduction to his posthumous volume, Popular Geology: “My dear husband, did, indeed, bring to his science all that fondness, while he found in it much of that kind of enjoyment, which we are wont to associate exclusively with the love of art.”¹⁹ Miller himself, puzzling about the antagonism sometimes found between science and poetry, unequivocally declared them brothers. Along with its particularities of crinoid and fish scale, geology can claim the evocative sweep—the poetry—of nature's variety in time. Just before his own death, Miller thought about that terrible Muse of poetry:

The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity charged with its annals, possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy for centuries to come.²⁰

Firm in his conception of the poetry of the “stony science,” Hugh Miller garnered a wide audience for his works, an audience appreciative of this clear thinker whose “relation to nature and the knowledge of nature” was yet “above all a personal and emotional one.”²¹ Personal, artistic, emotional responses to rocks and fossil fish—these mark Miller as a naturalist, and The Old Red Sandstone as natural history discourse.

Notes

1. Herbert Spencer, “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical,” in The Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature, Nos. 1-12 (New York: The Humboldt Publishing Co., n.d.), p. 284.

2. Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820-1870 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980), p. 230.

3. Barber, p. 236.

4. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore (London: Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1903), p. 218.

5. Spencer, p. 271.

6. Dennis R. Dean, “‘Through Science to Despair’: Geology and the Victorians,” in Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 360 (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1981), p. 120.

7. Barber, p. 225.

8. Dean, p. 120.

9. Kingsley, Glaucus, p. 11.

10. Both quoted in Barber, p. 230.

11. Barber, p. 231.

12. Julian M. Drachman, Studies in the Literature of Natural Science (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), p. 131.

13. Barber, p. 231.

14. Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field (London: J. M. Dent and Co., n.d.), p. 114. Further page citations are made within the text.

15. A selection from The Old Red Sandstone is among those anthologized in one recent collection of geological literature, Language of the Earth, ed. Frank H. T. Rhodes and Richard O. Stone (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981). Miller's selection, however, is included not for its scientific value, but rather in the section “Geologists Are Also Human,” pp. 36-41.

16. Noted in Dean, p. 115. Try as I might, I have been unable to track down the source of this particular quotation. However, Tennyson was fascinated by astronomy and geology, and recollections of the poet by those who knew him prove that he often mused on the vastness of geological time. For example, William Allingham quotes Tennyson as exclaiming: “Look at that hill (pointing to the one before the large window), it's four hundred millions of years old;—think of that!” In Norman Page, ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983), p. 53. Another acquaintance reported of the poet: “This led him to speak of prehistoric things, and of the wonders which geology had brought to light. He referred to the period of the Weald, when there was a mighty estuary, like that of the Ganges, where we then stood; and when gigantic lizards, the iguanodon, etc., were the chief of living things.” In Page, p. 180.

17. Barber, p. 231.

18. Carroll Lane Fenton and Mildred Adams Fenton, Giants of Geology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952), p. 212.

19. From the Introductory Résumé to Hugh Miller, Popular Geology: A Series of Lectures Read Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, With Descriptive Sketches from a Geologist's Portfolio (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), p. 12.

20. Miller, Popular Geology, p. 127.

21. Drachman, p. 132.