308 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



face inspection of nature in the quarried hill-side or on 

 the ribbed sea-shore, are interwoven with fresh, racy, 

 sagacious judgments on men and manners ; books in 

 which observations distinguished by exquisite scientific 

 accuracy furnish the ground -plan for landscapes over 

 which is poured the softest, ruddiest glow of imaginative 

 colouring. The nature of Hugh Miller's imaginative 

 power is characteristically exhibited in this work. His 

 imagination is bold, yet its audacity is always restrained 

 by reference to ascertained fact. Its pictures are never 

 vague. If, as one critic remarked, his fossil fishes ' swim 

 and gambol,' they do so as the mind's eye of Hugh 

 Miller, after severe inspection and long gaze into the 

 past, had seen them swim and gambol in primeval seas. 

 If the stone branch budded like a rod of Aaron on his 

 page, and forests, breaking from their sepulchres in the 

 rock, grew green again in the sunlight and rustled in the 

 wind, it was not that an oriental fancy delighted in 

 clothing phantom hills with visionary foliage, but be- 

 cause the science of the West had put into his hand a 

 lamp which lighted for him the long vistas of bygone 

 time. This species of imagination is the most valuable 

 which a scientific man can possess, and without it no 

 man, however accurate his observation, however just his 

 conception of individual facts, can be great in science. 

 True workers in science are of three kinds, in ascending 

 order of excellence, the accurate observer and com- 

 piler; the sound generalizer; and the seer of nature, 

 who first observes, then generalizes, and lastly illuminates 

 his generalizations so that they become visions. There 

 were many geologists of his time who, having devoted 

 themselves exclusively to science for nearly as many 

 years as Hugh Miller lived, traversed wider fields of 

 observation and attained a greater acquaintance with fact ; 



