260 HUGH MILLER 



Happy in the possession of this racial blending, he 

 was still more fortunate in the place of his birth. He 

 used to remark with satisfaction that both Sir Roderick 

 Murchison and he had been born on the Old Red 

 Sandstone of the Black Isle ; but while the career of 

 the author of the Silurian System owed practically 

 nothing to his birth-place, which he left while still an 

 infant, Miller's life from beginning to end bore the 

 impress of the surroundings amid which he was born 

 and educated. It would hardly be possible to choose 

 in this country a place of which the varied features 

 are more admirably fitted to stimulate the observing 

 faculties, to foster a love of nature, and to appeal 

 to the poetic imagination than the winding shores, 

 the scarped cliffs, the tangled woods, the wild boulder- 

 strewn moors and distant sweep of blue mountains 

 around Cromarty. And how often and lovingly are 

 these scenes portrayed by him under every varying 

 phase of weather and season ! They had stamped 

 themselves into his very soul and had become an 

 integral part of his being. 



' The sounding cataract 

 Haunted him like a passion ; the tall rock, 

 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 

 Their colours and their forms were then to him 

 An appetite, a feeling, and a love.' 



But while Nature was his first and best teacher, 

 he has told us in grateful words how much he owed 

 to two uncles — hard-working, sagacious, and observant 

 men, by whom his young eyes were trained to dis- 

 criminate flower and tree, bird and insect, together 

 with the teeming organisms of the shore, and whose 



