GEOLOGY. 141 



logic, sharp analysis, and severe inductive cross-examin- 

 ation of Fleming ; and to find a worthy antagonist, whom 

 he might bring under the raking fire of his argument- 

 ative batteries, was one of the choicest pleasures Fleming 

 could find in life. He was now in the prime of his 

 faculties; and his brilliant, incisive talk, touching, often 

 with caustic humour, on a thousand men and things, is 

 remembered by Mrs Miller as very pleasantly enlivening 

 their quiet life in Cromarty. 



The following passage from a letter of this period to 

 Dr Malcolmson, with its critical notes upon the specula- 

 tions of Agassiz and Lyell, has some interest as showing 

 Miller's geological whereabouts at the time. 



' Mrs Miller has read to me in very respectable Eng- 

 lish Agassiz' paper on the Moraines of Jura and the 

 Alps. I have been much interested in it. The pheno- 

 mena it describes are as new to me as the theory founded 

 upon them, and both serve to fill the imagination. But 

 where am I to seek a cause for the intense cold which 

 would cover Europe with one immense sheet of ice from 

 the pole to the shores of the Mediterranean ? and why 

 infer that the earth in cooling down, instead of gradu- 

 ally sinking in temperature according to the ordinary 

 and natural process, should sink by sudden fits and 

 starts, and reach at each leap a much lower degree than 

 it was subsequently able to maintain ? The theory, I 

 question not, accounts well for the appearances which 

 suggested it ; but then, like the tortoise, on whose 

 shoulders your old friends the Brahmins support the globe, 

 it seems sadly to lack footing for itself. I have got a 

 copy of Lyell's late work, the elementary one, and find 

 that he, too, in accounting for erratics, introduces the 

 agency of ice. His theory, if I may venture to decide, 

 seems much less open to objection than that of Agassiz, 



