Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

Leask, W. Keith (William Keith), 1857-

Date:: [pref. 1896]

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

128/168 (page 124)

whose book upon the ‘ Old Red ’ has seen its twentieth edition, whose Testimony of the Rocks is in its forty- second thousand, and whose Footprints has seen a seventeenth edition, has only attained this popularity by his solid merits as a writer and thinker. Mere popu- larisation cannot explain it. When a man has fully mastered his subject, and his subject has mastered him, there is sure to emerge a certain demonic force in literature or in science, all the more if the writer be a man with a style. It need hardly be said that geology, from its very first appearance, had been associated with distinct views in Biblical criticism. The old chronology of Archbishop Ussher in the margin* of the Authorised Version, by which b.c. 4004 was gravely assigned as the date of the Creation of the world, and b.c. 2348 for the Deluge, was in conflict with a science which required ages for its operations and not the limited confines of six thousand years, which form but a mere geological yesterday to the scientist like Lyell, wFo postulates some eighty millions of years for the formation of the coal-beds of Nova Scotia. The six ‘days’ of the Biblical Creation were thought unworthy, as a mere huddling of events into a point of time, of the Divine Wisdom, and impossible in conception. Mistakes in positive statement, no less than of implication, were also alleged against the Mosaic record, which was said to be admirable as literature if not immaculate in science. For long geology was regarded as a hostile