Footprints of the Creator
Or, the Asterolepis of Stromness

An argument from 1849 which uses geological discoveries and theology to dispute the then-current theories of evolution.

Hugh Miller (Author)

9781108005531, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

332 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.42 kg

The geological writings of Hugh Miller (1802–56) did much to publicise this relatively new science. After an early career in banking in Scotland, Miller became editor of a newly founded Edinburgh newspaper, The Witness, in which he published a series of his own articles based on his geological research, a collection of which was issued as a book, The Old Red Sandstone, in 1841, and led to the Devonian geological period becoming known as the 'Age of the Fishes'. Footprints of the Creator (1849) described his reconstruction of the extinct fish he had discovered in the Old Red Sandstone and argued, on theological grounds, that their perfection of development disproved the current Lamarckian theory of evolution. The book, illustrated with woodcuts, was written partly as a response to the then anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1884), also reissued in this series.

1. Stromness and its asterolepis
2. The development hypothesis and its consequences
3. The recent history of the asterolepis
4. Cerebral development of the earlier vertebrata
5. The asterolepis
6. Fishes of the silurian rocks, upper and lower
7. High standing of the placoids
8. The placoid brain
9. The progress of degradation
10. Evidence of the silurian molluscs
11. Superposition not parental relation
12. Lamarckian hypothesis of the origin of plants
13. The two floras, marine and terrestrial
14. The development hypothesis in its embryotic state
15. Final causes.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ]