Description
A lengthy Autograph Letter Signed ‘Hugh Miller’, to Colonel Ross, investigating irregularities of marriage in Scotland and elsewhere, discussing marriage contracts, Brougham’s arguments on these, comments on Robertson’s Treatise, raising difficulties such as whether a lunatic can enter a contract of marriage, and much else on this subject. About 1000 words on 3 pp. 9 x 7 inches, address panel, in very good clean condition. Cromarty,11 October 1830. Hugh Miller (1802–1856), considered one of Scotland’s most influential Victorian palaeontologists, geologist, evangelical journalist, and writer. Miller tackled the great question of the time, taking full part in the public debate on pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas, provoked notably by Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). In Footprints of the Creator (1849) and The Testimony of the Rocks (1857) Miller argued that the appearance of complex animals early in the fossil record refuted such naïve ideas of simple progression from primitive to advanced organisms. This valid objection was not refuted until after Miller’s death, by Charles Darwin’s non-progressionist theory of natural selection. [DNB]