The Foot-Prints of the Creator: or, The Asterolepis of Stromness

Boston: Gould and Lincoln. Very Good with No dust jacket as issued. 1857. Third Edition. Later Printing. Hard Cover. Publisher's full brown cloth, gilt lettering on spine, blind-stamped borders and decoration on cover, t.e.g. Illustrated with tissue-protected engraved frontispiece portrait of the author and 58 woodcuts in text. This is a later American printing based on the third London edition, and includes a Memoir of the Author by Louis Agassiz. Hugh Miller (1802 – 1856) was a self-taught Scottish geologist and writer, folklorist, and an evangelical Christian. Considered to be one of Scotland's greatest paleontologists, he made a number of important fossil discoveries, though his fervent religious beliefs led him to strongly oppose the then-emerging theory of evolution. For most of 1856, Miller suffered severe headaches and mental distress, and the most probable diagnosis is of psychotic depression. He feared that he might harm his wife or children because of persecutory delusions. Miller committed suicide, shooting himself in the chest with a revolver in his house on Tower Street, Portobello, on the night of 23/24 December 1856. That night he had finished checking printers' proofs for his book on geology and Christianity, "The Testimony of the Rocks." Before his death, he wrote a poem called "Strange but True." He died on 24 December 1856... Former owner's elegant hand-writted signature and date (1874) on fep, taped over a previous embossed bookplate. Hed of spine mildly worn, corners moderately bumped, moderate foxing, text block tight, square, and clean. VERY GOOD. . B&W Illustrations. 12mo 7" - 7½" tall. 337 pp .