Hugh Miller

he stones of the

al science that the geologist who stands still but for a very little must be content to find himself left behind.' The advancing tide of knowledge leaves the names of the early pioneers little more than a list of extinct volcanoes. Hooke and Burnet, Ray and Wood

osperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The problem of man and his destiny remains as rooted as ever, and the metaphysician has not been dislodged. The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the domain of mental science, and when transferred to the natural sciences the fight was not productive of the expected results. The times, as Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve round that centre: there is no pure entire confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and the school of natural science was in possession of the field. Now t

osophy. His mind was swift to perceive analogies, and such a type of mind, if it adds little to actual knowledge, is at least valuable as a stimulus. Carlyle in his political pamphlets has certainly not advanced the lines of the 'dismal science'; he even contemptuously doubted its existence, and he has done harm to it through the ready-reckoner school of à priori economists who refer everything with confidence to their own internal consciousness. Yet Carlyle at his worst has his value. He has the merit of showing that the problem is in its very nature an everlasting one, and that the plummet line of the mere profit-and-loss moralist will never sound the depths of man and his destin

e, and men highly endowed with this gift have a lasting and assured fame. Mr. Lowell has declared Clough to be the true poet of the restlessness of the later half of the century, and Tennyson to be but its pale reflex. But the answer is ready and invincible: Tennyson is read, and Clough is already on the shelf. As a piece of imaginative writing, The Old Red Sandstone is not likely to be soon surpassed in its own line. 'I would give,' we find Buckland declaring, 'my left hand to possess such powers of description as this man has.' 'There is,' says Carlyle, 'right genial fire, everywhere nobly tempered down with peaceful radical heat, which is very beautiful to see. Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, stro

eological and scientific minds, they can be said to be even yet settled. There is still the Voltairian type of thinker which is not yet exploded; and which, even in the case of Professor Huxley, has imagined that a mere shaking of the letter of a text or two is tantamount to an annihilation of the Christian faith. 'That the sacred books,' as Carlyle says, 'could be all else than a Bank of Faith Bill, for such and such quantities of enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world, value received; which Bill becomes a waste paper, the stamp being questioned; that the Christian Religion could have any deeper foundations than books, nothing of this seems to have even in the faintest matter occurred to Voltaire. Yet herein, as we believe the whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the question.' Science, in fact, after a long régime of even more than Macaulayesque cocksureness, is now abating its tone. It now no longer threatens like a second flood to cover the earth, and it is possible for mental and historical science to reappear like the earth out of the waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the limits of mind and matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no longer possible for a Voltai

this expectation is fully met in the Bible. But nowhere has man looked for the divine revelation of scientific truth, for it is in accordance with the economy of Providence, that Providence which is exhibited in gradual developments, that no such expectation has been or need be realised, the Principia of Newton and the discoveries of James Watt being both the result of the natural and unaided faculties of man.' Nay, more; there n

is intellect and that of his Creator there is a relation, since we find creature and Creator working by the same methods. Precisely as we see China arriving at the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass without any connection with the West, so we see the works of the Creator in the pal?ozoic period repeated by the tiny creature-worker, without any idea that he had been anticipated. Thus Creation is not merely a scheme adapted to the

lf-contradiction of the idea of God; He but creates the being that in turn creates sin. 'Fore-knowledge,' as Milton says, 'had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain unforeseen.' Perhaps this is as near as we are ever likely to get. But the Fall in its theological aspect, while it must be fully apprehended by faith, has nothing to fear from science, which teaches, if it can be said emphaticall

ght to square with the distinct statement of the primal creation of light in Genesis. On the other hand, Miller notices that geology, as dealing not with the nature of things, but only with their actual manifestations, has to do with but three of the six days or periods. The scale of all geologists is divided into three great classes. Lesser divisions of systems, deposits, beds, and strata may exist; but the master divisions, as he calls them, are simply those three which even the unpractised eye can detect-the Pal?ozoic, the Secondary, and the Tertiary. The first is the period of extraordinary fauna and flora-the period emphatically of forests and huge pines, 'the herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit.' The second is the age of monsters, rept

ionably the merit of imaginative power, and is in full harmony with the nature of man's mind, and is therefore preferable to any theory which would assert the exact science of the Mosaic record by its anticipation of the theory of Laplace and Herschel, by which the earth existed before the sun was given as a luminary, and was independent of

The record, therefore, he regards as according to appearance rather than to physical realities: 'The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until the fourth day of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface.' The six days or periods he takes to correspond with the six divisions in a successive series of the Azoic, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Oolitic, and Tertiary ages. To the human eye of the seer, the se

nd the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror"; and as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision to a few brief moments, pass away; the creative word is again heard, "Le

the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold-an upper sea of great waves, separat

from the deep-not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees-of palms and tree-ferns, and gigantic club-mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is a dee

n arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of richer green; and as the sun d

But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser si

hing pot or caldron." Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy sce

e reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature-the lion, the leopard, and the bear-harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their pre

d which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And over it no eveni

ho first taught

ng how the hea

ut of

cientific truth that militates against even th

d from Sir Charles Lyell up to the Prince Consort; and so strong were the feelings aroused that they defeated a proposal to bring in Chambers as Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1848, and the secret was not formally divulged till the issue by Ireland in 1884 of a twelfth edition. The book is written in a 'powerful and brilliant style,' as Darwin says; and, though long out of print, its re-issue by Routledge and Son in their Universal Library has again drawn attention to its views, which in Scotland caused something of the stir produced by the appearance in England of Essays and Reviews. Chambers, indeed, regarded his book as

were true, it would follow that the oldest fossils would be small, and low in organisation. But, so far is this from being the case that the oldest organisms, whether that be the asterolepis or the cephalaspid? or the acanthid?, are large and high. One asterolepis found at Thurso measures over twelve feet, and a Russian specimen described by Professor Asmus of Dorpat

e in numbers to give it any peculiar standing as a home of men. But in estimating the highest point in the scale to which the animal kingdom has attained, it is of the few men, not of its many beasts, that we must take note.' Thus he maintains that the existence of a single cephalopod or one cuttlefish among a wilderness of brachiopods is sufficient to indicate the mark already attained in the scale of being, just as the existence of the human family, when restricted to a pair, in

a tree, and that the vegetation of the coal-measures had been 'magnificent immaturities' of the vegetable kingdom. But the quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh, alone would refute it, not to speak of the coal-fields of Dalkeith and Falkirk with their a

egian hills,

great am

o necessity for the lower producing the higher. Nor has transmutation of marine into terrestrial vegetation been proved. This had been the mainstay of the Lamarckian hypothesis, and had been adopted from the brilliant but fancifully written Telliamed (an anagram, by the way, of the author's name) of De Maillet by both Oken and Chambers, who had found in the Delphinid? the marine progenitors of the Simiad?, and through them of man-a curious approximation to some recent crude ideas of Professor Drummond in his Ascent of Man. Th

'it is difficult to imagine that that uniform cessation of organised life at one point, which seems to have conducted Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor Sedgwick to their conclusion, should thus have been a mere effect of accident. Accident has its laws, but uniformity is not one of them; and should the experience be invariable, as it already seems extensive, that immediately beneath the fucoidal beds organic remains cease, I do not see how the conclusion is to be avoided, that they represent the period in which, at least, existences capable of

avy apparatus of learning, singularly fails in comparison with the sagacity of Bentley or the instinct of Porson. What habits of classical verse-composition had done for these scholars is brought to the geologist by observation. This, in unison with creative mental power, will alone preserve the name of the natural scientist. The first has kept White of Selborne a literary evergreen: the second has maintained his place for Cuvier. Miller's own friend, Dr. Longmuir, rightly singles out this Champollion-like trait of sagacity as his most characteristic feature, by which 'he seemed by intuition to perceive what cost other minds no small amount of careful investi

detected in his style an element of exuberance; and this may be allowed in his narrative and descriptive passages. There would appear to have been, as it were, a Celtic lobe of imagination in his mind for the feeling of discursive description and external nature. Thus, in his slightest landscapes his imagination or eye is not satisfied with the few bold touches such as Carlyle would, after his manner, throw upon the canvas. It expands, like the method of Ruskin, over the surface. But in each case the defect is the result of or

e had to a considerable extent believed the question at issue to be one that concerned mainly the clergy. This had been the standpoint of the Moderate organs, in a wary attempt to win over the laity. But by the Letter to Brougham he won the ear of the people, and to the end he never lost it. By 1841 the political candidates in Scotland at the general election had proclaimed themselves, with a single exception, in favour of some distinct alteration of the law of patronage. Whether Church papers are or are not a blessing-in England they have become a menace to political action and a medium for the most offensive clericalism and reactionary measures-may safely be left out of account in settling the question in his own case, for, as we have seen, he had never consented to make his paper a merely ecclesiastical organ. But of the work which he accomplished as a leader-writer and as an exponent of popular rights we have the unhesitating estimate of Guthr

y be defects of knowledge, but there is no defect of spirit; and here we cannot do better than set down the opinion of his friend, Sir Archibald Geikie, who has a connection both with Miller and with Murchison thro

successful speculation. In all that relates to the stratigraphical sequence of the formations, for example, he accepted what had been done by others without any critical examination of it. Thus, in his own region-the north of Scotland-he believed that a girdle of Old Red Sandstone nearly encircles the older crystalline rocks of Ross and Sutherland

l adequately as a naturalist with the organisms which he discovered. He was himself perfectly conscious of the limitations of his powers in this department, and thus wisely refr

magination led him to seize more especially on those aspects of the past history of the earth which could be most vividly realised. He loved to collect the plants and animals of which the remains have been entombed among the rocks, and to re-people with them the scenes in which they lived long ages ago. Each sc

he exerted among his contemporaries. It was this that enabled him to spread so widely a curiosity to know something of geological science, and an interest in the progress of geological discovery. I do not think that the debt which geology owes to him for these services, in deepening the popular estimation of the science, and in increasing the number of its devotees, has ever been sufficiently acknowledged. During his

s. He brought me completely under the spell of his personal charm, and filled me with an enthusiastic love for the man as well as a passionate admiration for the geologist. Nor has the glamour of that early friendship passed away. I would rather leave to others the invidious task of coldly dissecting Hugh Miller's work and seeing how much of it has been a permanent a

e study of the Boulder-Clay. The last years of his life were more especially devoted to that interesting formation in which he found fossil shells in many parts of Scotland where they had never been found before. I well remember my last interview with him, only a few evenings before his death. He had spent a short holiday in the low ground about Bucklyvie between the Forth and Clyde, and had collected a number of marine shells, which led him to draw a graphic picture of what must have been the condition of cen

f his friendship and of his genial enthusiasm. His writings formed my earliest geological text-books, and I shall never cease to look back upon their influence with gratitude. They

, Buckland in his Bridgewater Treatise had briefly dismissed it, and it was a new revelation in geology to make known its scientific importance. In dedicating the book to Sir Roderick Murchison, who had been born at Taradale on the Beauly Firth in 1792, he could say that Smith, the father of English geology, had been born upon the Oolite: they, he added, had been born upon the Old Red. Rarely could nature afford a more striking example of the true and the picturesque, than in these two widely differing memorials, the one in the Princes Str

med to borrow respect for the dignity of all labour and of his own calling. Goldsmith thought of Burke that in giving up to party what was meant for mankind he had narrowed his mental powers and lessened his influence and force. It may be that there are some who think that, in doing the ecclesiastical work which he accomplished, he had given up to the Church of Scotland in all her branches what was meant for science. Such a judgment would be incorrect; it would

4

e Rocks, pp. 18

IOGR

he Leisure Hours of a Jo

g Fishery. Inverness (repri

rth of Scotland; or, The Tradition

ht Hon. Lord Brougham and Vaux, on the opinions express

mplified by the Past History and Present Po

New Walks in an Old Field. Edin

ons of England and i

eator; or, the Asterolepis

n Examination of the Resolutions of the Rev. Dr. Alex

ection contributed to M'Crie's Hi

ation. Edinburgh (repu

of My Education (Edinburgh, 1854). Popular editi

Scotland. Edinburgh (address to Ro

g a view of the Modifying Effects of Geological Discovery on the Old Ast

o Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Edinburgh (Twelve lectures before

posits of the Highlands; with Rambles of a Geologist, or Ten Thousand Miles ov

Mrs. Miller. (Lectures delivered before the Ph

by Dr. P. Bayne (repu

d by Mrs. Miller (contributions

od. Edited by Mrs. Miller. Edinburg

he Christian People. With preface by Dr. P. Bayn

in-law, the Rev. John Davidson. New editio

Hugh Miller's Works is taken from Messrs. W

lmasters; or, The St

n its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Nat

ons of England

k of Popul

rth of Scotland; or, The Tra

, New Walks in an Old Fie

erous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist; or,

ess. With Preface and Notes by Mrs. Miller, and a Biogra

Edited, with a Pre

, Geological and Historical. Wi

raphical, Political and Soc

w, the Rev. John Davidson. With a Characteristic Portrait of

ights of the Christian People. W

US S

AS C

OR C. M

itten, far outweighing in value some more pretentiou

lishers on the happy commencement of thi

uence in the domains of morals, politics, and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care

rkings of a master-mind, and is lighted up by many

y of a wonderful wr

eadable book.'-

s, and worthy of a national series such as

ble, masterly, and painstaki

N RA

PHANT

winning.'-Dun

limpses of Scottish life in the l

ing monograph.'-

r gives an able analysis of his chief writings. The whole book i

tion to our national biography

adable.'-Bord

t is told with vigou

e of the poet, as well as a well-balanced esti

ship and much enthusiasm in h

ttle wig-maker lives for us in Mr

ntelligent study

ry craftsmanship by a competent

s subject and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well in hand, a

riber'

errors have been cor

istencies in the text hav