Born, at Cromarty, 10 Oct. 1802. At school at Cromarty. Apprenticed to stonemason, 1819–22. Journeyman mason, 1822–34. Contrib. to “Inverness Courier,” 1829. Accountant in Commercial Bank, Cromarty, 1834 to Dec. 1839. Married Lydia Falconer Fraser, 7 Jan. 1837. To Edinburgh, Dec. 1839. Editor of “The Witness,” Jan. 1840; part proprietor, 1845. Visit to England, 1845. Brain gave way suddenly under severe illness; committed suicide, at Shrub Mount, near Edinburgh, 24 Dec. 1856. Buried in Grange Cemetery. Works: “Poems written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason” (anon.), 1829; “Letters on the Herring Fishery” (anon.; from “Inverness Courier”), 1829; “Words of Warning to the People of Scotland,” 1834 [?]; “Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland,” 1835; “Letter … to Lord Brougham,” 1839; “Memoir of William Forsyth,” 1839; “The Whiggism of the Old School,” 1839; “The Old Red Sandstone” (from “The Witness”), 1841; “The Two Parties in the Church of Scotland,” 1841; “The Two Mr. Clarks” (anon.), 1843; “Sutherland as it was and is” (anon.), 1843; “The Riots in Ross” (anon.), 1843; “Sutherland and the Sutherlanders” (anon.), 1844; “First Impressions of England, and its People,” 1847; “Footprints of the Creator,” 1849; “Thoughts on the Educational Question,” 1850; “My Schools and Schoolmasters,” 1852; “The Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland,” 1854; “Geology versus Astronomy” [1855]; “Strange but True” [1856]. Posthumous: “The Testimony of the Rocks,” 1857; “The Cruise of the Betsey,” ed. by W. S. Symonds, 1858; “Sketchbook of Popular Geology,” ed. by his wife, 1859; “The Headship of Christ,” 1861; “Essays,” ed. by P. Bayne, 1862; “Tales and Sketches,” ed. by his wife, 1863; “Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood,” ed. by his wife, 1864; “Leading Articles on Various Subjects,” ed. by J. Davidson, 1870. He edited: “Sermons for Sabbath Evenings,” 1848. Life: “Life and Letters,” by P. Bayne, 1871.

Personal

  Dearest Lydia,—My brain burns, I must have walked; and a fearful dream arises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought. God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell. My brain burns as the recollection grows. My dear, dear wife, farewell.

  In the last days of 1856, Hugh Miller died, a self-sacrificed martyr to science. At the great work which was to complete his service to his country and mankind he toiled on with indomitable resolution, amid the paroxysms of fearful disease. His powerful brain, wearied with the sustained tension of twenty years, recoiled from its work, and, as it were, groaned and struggled for rest. But that adamantine will knew no flinching. Ever, as the paroxysm passed by, and the soft glow of the old genius spread itself again along the mind, the most intense and unremitted exertion was compelled. The light burned nightly in his chamber, long after the midnight hour, as Hugh Miller continued to write, the body failing, the nerves fluttering, the brain still held to its work only by that indomitable will. He feared madness might dash the pen from his hand before the last line was traced. But the work was finished. On the last day of his life Hugh Miller said it was done. Madness and the grave could not at least deprive him of that. Then, as might have been expected, despite consultation with a physician, the paroxysm returned with redoubled fury; ere it again subsided, Hugh Miller was no more.

  Hugh Miller has very strikingly worked out this idea in his admirable autobiography, entitled, “My Schools and Schoolmasters.” It is extremely interesting, even fascinating, as a book; but it is more than an ordinary book,—it might almost be called an institution. It is the history of the formation of a truly noble and independent character in the humblest condition of life,—the condition in which a large mass of the people of this country are born and brought up; and it teaches all, but especially poor men, what it is in the power of each to accomplish for himself. The life of Hugh Miller is full of lessons of self-help and self-respect, and shows the efficacy of these in working out for a man an honorable competence and a solid reputation.

  Who in Edinburgh, old enough to remember him, can forget the figure of that massively-built man, roughly apparelled in gray, or some dusty, reddish-brown, like an ex-stonemason not ashamed of himself, or the sad, resolute look of his sandy-coloured face, the features of which seemed smaller than they were from the quantity of reddish hair that matted his great round head? There was such a prevailing impression of reddishness, and even of stony reddishness, in his approach, that one instinctively thought of his own “Old Red Sandstone.” His head might have been taken as a model for that of Gurth in “Ivanhoe,” or, with a little alteration, for that of Rob Roy—for whom also he would have been no inapt model for breadth of chest, and personal strength. As a stonemason, he used to lift or roll weights twice as great as an ordinary man could manage. He had a pride in this; and one of his habits, I noticed, was an inquisitiveness as to the physical measurements and capabilities of those with whom he came in contact. “What is your height?” he would say, suddenly facing you, or “What is the girth of your chest?” looking at you sideways; and, if you were not prepared with an exact answer, he seemed surprised.

  He was a man raised up in Divine Providence for the time and the age. His business was to fight,—and, like the war-horse that saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha, and smelleth the battle afar off, fighting was Miller’s delight. On the eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in such a high and happy state of eagerness and excitement, that he seemed to me like some Indian brave, painted, plumed, leaping into the arena with a shout of defiance, flashing a tomahawk in his hand, and wearing at his girdle a very fringe of scalps, plucked from the heads of enemies that had fallen beneath his stroke. He was a scientific as well as an ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less throwing away, his whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the interest of the controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his opponents by fresh matter in every succeeding paper. When I used to discuss subjects with him, under the impression perhaps that he had said all he had got to say very powerful and very pertinent to the question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in nautical phrase, “Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet—ready for use if it is needed!”

  The conversation of Hugh Miller, though agreeable and instructive, was not equal in charm to that of Robert Chambers. The mind of Hugh Miller was so wedded to the study of geology as to leave him but little inclination to diverge into the wider fields of history, philosophy, romance, and poetry, where he might have roamed to his own advantage, and that of the world, had time allowed and preoccupation not prevented. The no-wise related subjects of geology and the politics of the Free Church of Scotland occupied him fully; geology for the love he bore in it, and the Free Church politics for the discussion and dissemination of which he had become dependent for the daily bread of himself and his household.

  Miller’s features were rugged, but his calm, grey eyes and pleasing smile softened their austerity. His voice was gentle. Not mixing much in general society, he reckoned himself a working man to the end, but he carried himself with much natural stateliness.

  I count it as one of the privileges of my life to have known Hugh Miller, and as one of its chief losses that he was so suddenly removed when I had hardly realized the full value of 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 ought to be far more widely read than they seem now to be. Assuredly no young geologist will find more stimulating chapters than those penned by the author of the “Old Red Sandstone.”

  His funeral was the largest Edinburgh had seen since that of Chalmers, and by his side in the Grange Cemetery he was laid. To the mass of his countrymen abroad he was the greatest of living Scotchmen. His works had given him a European reputation in science, while to those at home the work he accomplished as a tribune of the people had given him a position second only to that of Guthrie.

General

  In Mr. Miller we have to hail the accession to geological writers of a man highly qualified to advance the science. The work is to a beginner worth a thousand didactic treatises.

  A geological work [“Old Red Sandstone”] has appeared, small in size, unpretending in spirit and manner, its contents the conscientious and accurate narrative of fact, its style the beautiful simplicity of truth, and altogether possessing, for a rational reader, an interest superior to that of a novel.

  In Mr. Miller’s charming little work [“Old Red Sandstone”] will be found a very graphic description of the Old Red fishes. I know not a more fascinating volume on any branch of British geology.

  The works of Hugh Miller have excited the greatest interest, not only among scientific men, but also among general readers. There is in them a freshness of conception, a power of argumentation, a depth of thought, and a purity of feeling, rarely met with in works of such character, which are well calculated to call forth sympathy, and to increase the popularity of a science which has already done so much to expand our views of the plan of creation. The scientific illustrations published by Mr. Miller are most happily combined with considerations of a higher order, rendering both equally acceptable to the thinking reader. But what is in a great degree peculiar to our author is the successful combination of Christian doctrines with pure scientific truth.

  “The Old Red Sandstone” was the first purely scientific volume published by Mr. Miller; and it placed him at once in the very front rank of geological observers and writers. Not the least attractive portion of this volume is that which introduces us to a knowlege of the author’s own history, and tells us how he first became attracted to the study of geology, though without being conscious of what he was doing…. Never had fishes so fascinating a historian. Their dry bones wake into life beneath his pen, and scenes of the antediluvian world almost become matters of personal knowledge to us.

  One of the most original writers of this age.

  Hugh Miller stands alone, as far as I am aware, among self-educated men of recent times, first, in the thoroughness of his education, the technically disciplined and ordered thinking to which he attained, secondly, in the absence from his books and letters of all extravagance, histrionism; paradox, of all traces of that furious, teeth-gnashing humor which has been so much in vogue in our century. Great instincts of order and of common sense, inherited from his father, allied him to what was stable in the institutions of his country. Religion, integrity, continence, moderation, obedience,—all those virtues against which the waves of modern anarchism beat wild, saw him fighting behind their bulwark. They are shallow critics who recognize genius only, as Uriel recognized Satan, by the violence of its gestures and the devilishness of its scowl; in healthful times men of genius have neither affected a perverse singularity, nor taken as their dialect an everlasting snarl. That Hugh Miller was a man of genius would never have been called in question had his works not been so free from the distempers of genius!

  Hugh Miller, the author of “The Old Red Sandstone” and “The Testimony of the Rocks,” the devotee and unfortunately the martyr of scientific inquiry, brought a fresh and brilliant literary ability, almost as untutored and spontaneous as that of his immortal countryman, Robert Burns, to bear on the exposition of the studies to which he literally sacrificed his life.

  The scientific value of these works is generally acknowledged; their literary merit is hardly less marked. Though his verses were never particularly successful, Hugh Miller was a thorough poet at heart. Metre was not the most suitable vehicle for the expression of his thoughts, and it was not yet the custom to cut up prose into lines of unequal length with capital letters at the beginning and call that poetry. But in his power of picturesque and fervid prose, he may at least claim a high rank among poetical writers.

  Hugh Miller will always occupy a peculiar place in the history of geology, and in the ranks of geological literature. He was not in any sense a trained geologist. He lacked the habit of patience and detailed investigation in departments of the science that did not specially interest him, but which were essential as a basis of accurate induction and successful speculation…. Hugh Miller’s unique position is that of a poetic student of the geological side of Nature, who possessed an unrivalled gift of vividly communicating to others the impressions made on his own mind by the observation of geological fact and by the inference which such observation seemed to warrant. His lively imagination led him to seize more especially on those aspects of the past history of the earth which could be most vividly realized. He loved to collect the plants and the 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 scattered fact was marshalled by his eager fancy into its due place in the mental picture which he drew of such long-vanished lands, lakes, rivers, and seas. His enthusiasm supplied details where facts were wanting, and enabled him to kindle in his readers not a little of the burning interest which he felt himself.

  The Witness started with a circulation of six hundred. Its position among the Scottish papers was at once assured, and no greater proof of the personality of the editor and the quality of “the leaders” remains than in the curious fact that, now after half a century, to the great mass of the people his name has been not Miller, nor Mr. Miller, but Hugh Miller. As in the similar case of John Bright the people seized on the fact that here was a writer and speaker sprung from themselves, and his Christian name was as familiar as his surname.

  But whatever the scientific value of Miller’s geological discoveries, and whatever the equipment of exact science which he brought to their elucidation, he had two qualities which make him almost unique as a scientific writer—a wealth of imagination, and a marvellous power of picturesque description, instinct with moral feeling. No writer has treated geological discoveries with more of that artistic skill which is rarely applied to any but the outward and obvious aspects of nature; and no writer can more readily make his descriptions serve as vehicles of moral emotion, and of deep human sympathy. That his art, however natural, was perfect in its kind, is seen in the entire absence of anything that is akin to fine writing or rodomontade. There is no tawdriness of ornament, and its absence gives that force and dignity which must surely prevent Miller’s writing, however limited on its scientific side, from being altogether forgotten or neglected.

  A great deal of Miller’s work was done for The Witness. He was a most conscientious as well as a most able journalist, and he brought to his occupation a rare literary power. There was an imaginative and poetic strain in his nature which sometimes showed itself in the weaker form of writing, but often gave eloquence to his descriptions and fervour to his argument. This is the living part of him; for it is certainly not their scientific value that causes Hugh Miller’s books to be still read…. In their geological aspect they merely supply the raw material of science. Miller had not the previous training requisite to give his work the highest value. He knew little or nothing about comparative anatomy, and therefore could not himself deal with the fossils he discovered. In the view of modern experts his scientific value lies in his strong common sense and his keen powers of observation amounting almost to genius. His function is to stimulate others rather than to sway thought by great discoveries.