SOURCE: Paradis, James G. “The Natural Historian as Antiquary of the World: Hugh Miller and the Rise of Literary Natural History.” In Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science, edited by Michael Shortland, pp. 122-49. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Paradis examines Scenes and Legends, The Old Red Sandstone and Footprints of the Creator.

Geological Aesthetics

Standing in the Newcastle town museum on his English ramble during the rainy autumn of 1845, Hugh Miller reflected upon the extensive geological fragments and Anglo-Roman antiquities, collected from the countryside near Hadrian's Wall:

As I passed, in the geologic apartment, from the older Silurian to the newer Tertiary, and then on from the newer Tertiary to the votive tablets, sacrificial altars, and sepulchral memorials of the Anglo-Roman gallery, I could not help regarding them as all belonging to one department. The antiquities piece on in natural sequence to the...