FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR

Footprints of the Creator ; or 'The Asterolepis of Stomness. By Hugh Miller author of "The Old Red Sandstone,'' &c., Edinburgh ; Johnstone and Hunter.
 The works of the able Editor of the Witness are all of a character equally marked by scientific knowledge, philosophical thoughts, and the rich embellishments of language and imagination. But among the whole there is not one superior, if, indeed, equal, to this small volume; and the circumstance of its having, within a short period, reached a second edition shews the appreciation which it has received at the hands of the public, notwithstanding that it is of a more scientific nature than is apt to win much popularity. It has, however, a high object. It is minute in its scientific details, dwelling on the comparative measurements of the different fossils, found in different formations, and necessarily so for the purpose of encountering the theory of "development" urged by the continental philosophers, particularly by Professor Oken, and Malliet and Lamarck ; but this minuteness, that at first, to the non-scientific reader, if dry and wearisome, assumes a new and deep interest as soon as it becomes apparent that each step is adding to the cumulative argument in support the scripture history of man's creation against the barely scientific hypothesis.

Our scientific readers will excuse us should we, for the sake of the many who have not devoted their minds to such subjects, give a common-sense outline of the question, and the bearing of this little work upon it.
 The theory of development has been made familiar to the public of this country by a work that lately attained a remarkable degree of popularity ; but which is little more than a compilation from the vast physical researches of Oken and Lamarck, viz,, "The Vestiges of Creation:" The purely metaphysical study rests among its transcendental abstractions ; and the high class of minds who used to dwell on its generalisations and found their deductions on the character of man, have gone down to the very depths of nature to base their arguments among the pillars of the earth, and to search into its bowels for the first indications of life, that in the present phase of creation, has attained the completion of its glorious archetype in the structure of the human body and the grandeur of the human mind. The advocates of the theory of development range race upon race through the long geologic periods, whose traces are now only to be found imbedded in the bosom of primal rocks, as improving in organism, one upon another, upwards from the first organic exigence in the minute microscopical infusiora, rising through various gradations of fishes, till, as the author of Vestiges of Creation opines, they become dolphius, and from them, by some unaccountable transmigration, they appear next in the character of monkeys. " All life," says Oken (as here quoted), " is from the sea, none from the continent. Man, also is the child of the warm and shallow parts of the sea in the neighbourhood of the land." The author of the Vestiges of Creation founds his hypothesis on the form and size of the brain of the dolphin, which is, of all the mammalia, next to the ourang-outang and man ; — of course, Lord Monboddo's idea about the cutting on the inconvenient caudal appendage of the Semiadae must be involved in those views of development. It is needless to bring the charge of atheism — in whatever light we regard them with relation to Christianity — against the supporters of this hypothesis, since God's province is as evident in the uniform and systematic working of fixed laws as in miraculous interposition for a specific purpose. There can be no doubt of the truth, in so far as geological research goes, of the uniformity exhibited in the progress of both animal and vegetable development in each strata above the amorphous rocks, in which the influence of five has obliterated every trace of extraneous objects. This theory, which was at first scarcely based inductively on geological experience, but which geological experience has corroborated, and adopted, is supported by the analogy of Oken's wonderful theory of foetal development. According to the Professor of Zurich, the foetus of every animal passes through the respective essential organization of the whole phases of animal creation, by which it has been preceded, in the same order as they are found stratified in the fossiliferous rocks. First, the beginning of animal life in the infusorial character, as a mere "intestinal" bag, and gradually passing through the whole classes of moluses, fishes, reptiles, animals — not certainly in form and appearance, but in the essentially vital characteristics of each stage. This, notwithstanding that it is the theory of an infidel, who adheres very tenanciously to a more scientifically expressed form of platonic theory of metompsycosis, is not to be rejected as a merely fanciful hypothesis. Rash and unwarrantable as the deductions may be, the facts are founded on close anatomical investigation ; and whatever ground may exist for Mr. Miller's dissatisfaction with the geological knowledge of the continental rationalists, there is certainly no fault to be found with, at least the minuteness to which they have carried their researches in comparative anatomy. Many of the best anatomists of the present day feel half inclined to adopt the simplicity of the transcendental system, and even to regard the scull as it appears in the first specimens of vertebrated organizations, as but an enlarged repetition of the vertebral joints. Professor Owen, a more philosophical expositor of the continental physio-philosphers than the author of the "Vestiges," adopts this theory ; and Mr. Miller is not inclined to reject it, although certainly indisposed to accompany its propounders to the full extent of the generalisaation which they base on this and other alleged anatomical and geological facts.
 One of the chief objects of Mr. Miller's work— in fact the leading purport of it — is to break one of the links of the chain of progressive development, by pointing out that in the lowest of the fossiliferous rocks which are set down by the continental geologists, and their expositor, the author of the Vestiges of Creation, as containing only the lower classes of animal organism — the molluscs — there are to be found traces of vertebrated animals. The asterolepsis, the largest genoid of the old red sandstone, it appears, has left some memorials of its existence in those far away ages, where water, earth, and air are regarded as having first united in breathing the breath of life into the mucous globules that appeared on the flood-marks of the lonely islands of a lifeless world, and began to cover the land with vegetation, and fill the ocean with animal organizations. One of these was found by Sir Roderick Murchison in Cornwall — in the Cambrian deposits, under the Lower Silurian division, which was regarded as the lowest of the fossiliferous strata, and as containing only moucous deposits ; and in Orkney, at the opposite extremity of the country, Mr. Miller has found traces of the asterolepsis, in the same hitherto unexpected situation. On this circumstance he bases an argument not exactly against the theory, but against its completeness in one particular and in support of the probability of a high stage of animal organisation in fishes, existing beyond the period assigned to the sole do minion of the invertebrate tribes. He has a vast accumulation of physical research, and metaphysical thought to encounter ; and were we to stand on the isolated position of mere searchers after natural phenomena, we might regard him as failing in the logical argument.

Port Phillip Gazette and Settler's Journal (Vic. : 1845 - 1850), Tuesday 16 April 1850, page 4