Footprints of the Creator

Footprints of the Creator (1849) describes Hugh Miller's reconstruction of the extinct fish he had discovered in the Old Red Sandstone and argues, on theological grounds, that their perfection of development disproved the Lamarckian theory of evolution and hence the thesis of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.

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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.