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The Testimony of the Rocks
1857 · 500 pages
The Testimony of the Rocks
by Hugh Miller
Hugh Miller broke stone for a living before he became one of the most widely read geologists in Britain, and he wrote about rocks like a man who had held them. The Testimony of the Rocks is his attempt to set the geological record and the Genesis account in a relation that does violence to neither — the major Victorian effort at that problem, made by someone who had lost his faith to doubt and found it again, and who knew the strata first-hand.
The convert behind the argument
Miller was apprenticed to a stonemason at seventeen and educated himself in the quarries, where the fossils he found set him on the path to geology. He passed through a period of scepticism in his youth and returned to the evangelical faith of his upbringing, becoming editor of the Free Church newspaper The Witness after the Disruption of 1843. The Testimony was published in 1857, the year after his death.
Summary
The book gathers Miller's lectures and essays on geology in its bearings on what he calls the two theologies, natural and revealed. It moves between straight geological description — the palaeontology of the Old Red Sandstone he knew better than anyone, the succession of the strata, the fossil floras — and the interpretive question of how that record relates to the opening of Genesis.
His own solution treats the days of Genesis as long periods and reads the account as a series of visions of successive creative epochs rather than a technical chronology. He argues against both a young earth and the developmental hypotheses of his day, and devotes considerable space to the geological evidence bearing on the Noachian flood, which he took to have been regional rather than global.
What has kept the book readable is the prose. Miller wrote descriptive passages about deep time — the slow cooling of a volcanic world, the first light through cloud — that were admired as literature in their own right, and he never lost the self-taught workman's habit of explaining things concretely.
Who was Hugh Miller?
Hugh Miller (1802–1856) was born in Cromarty in the Scottish Highlands, lost his father at sea as a boy, and was apprenticed to a stonemason at seventeen. The fossils he turned up in the quarries made him a geologist; his book The Old Red Sandstone (1841) established his scientific reputation without any formal training behind it.
He became a bank accountant, then a journalist, and after the Disruption of 1843 edited The Witness, the newspaper of the Free Church of Scotland, from which he was one of the most influential Scottish voices of his generation. He suffered increasingly from overwork and mental distress in his last years and died by his own hand in December 1856, shortly before this book appeared.
Common questions
- What is The Testimony of the Rocks about?
- It is Hugh Miller's attempt to reconcile the geological record with the Genesis account of creation, written by a self-taught working geologist. He argues for an old earth, treats the days of Genesis as long creative epochs presented as a series of visions, and disputes both young-earth readings and the developmental theories of his day.
- Who was Hugh Miller?
- A Scottish stonemason who taught himself geology in the quarries and became one of the best-known scientific writers in Britain, as well as editor of the Free Church newspaper The Witness. He had passed through youthful scepticism before returning to faith.
A note on the text. The Testimony of the Rocks is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.