Who he was
The minister of Ruthwell, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, who lived from 1774 to 1846. He was also a writer, an educator and a social reformer, and he founded the savings bank movement.
The slab in the summerhouse
In 1824 he was given a slab of red sandstone from the Corncockle Muir quarry with footprints on it. One slab, 5 feet 2 inches long, carried twenty-four prints in two lines, twelve right and twelve left. It was built into the summerhouse in the garden of his manse. He wrote to William Buckland at Oxford and sent him casts of the prints.
The first report
On January 7, 1828, he described the footprints to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and quoted Buckland's tortoise verdict. It was the first scientific report of fossil footprints. Several newspapers carried the story as footsteps before the Flood, and his paper was printed in 1831.
Read the sources
- Duncan, An account of the tracks and footmarks of animals found impressed on sandstone in the quarry of Corncockle Muir · Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1831)
- History of ichnology: the correspondence between the Reverend Henry Duncan and the Reverend William Buckland · Ichnos (2007)