Hugh Miller

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Hugh Miller was one of the most remarkable intellectuals in Victorian Scotland. The son of a Cromarty fisherman who was lost at sea when Hugh was only five years old, Miller was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to a local stonemason. In 1840 he launched his journalistic career with the pro-Evangelical newspaper The Witness. A champion of the new Free Church, Miller simultaneously pursued his research in geology and palaeontology and made important contributions to the debate on evolution, combating Darwinian theory in his Footprints of the Creator (1850) and The Testimony of the Rocks (1857). Miller died by his own hand in 1856. His wife Lydia wrote an extraordinary account of his life.