CHAIR OF NATURAL HISTORY. 445 



ever, the honour is one which I beg respectfully to 

 decline. I am, perhaps, not quite without apology for 

 having done but little for literature and science com- 

 pared with what I had once hoped, and still wish to do ; 

 but I am conscious that what I have yet accomplished 

 is but little, and you will, I trust, attribute to the right 

 feeling my determination of accepting no place to which 

 my claim on the score of merit might with justice be 

 challenged. The last ten years of my life have been 

 exceedingly busy ones, nor were the harassing occupa- 

 tions in which they were spent of a nature very favour- 

 able to acquirement of the more solid or thought of the 

 profounder kind. In that period, however, I was en- 

 abled to give to the public two little works, one de- 

 scriptive of the second period of vertebrate existence on 

 our planet, and one an examination of those evidences 

 which connect the first beginnings of life in the remote 

 past with the fiat of a Creator, that have been favour- 

 ably received by men of science on both sides of the 

 " Atlantic. And should there be some ten or twelve 

 years of active life, or a greater time still, before me, I 

 may, I trust, succeed in doing for the geology of Scot- 

 land what may render me at least more worthy than now 

 of an honour in connection with some of our Scottish 

 Universities such as that which, in your too partial 

 kindness, you at present propose. Trusting that you 

 will sustain my reasons for declining your very gratifying 

 proposal both as valid themselves and as proffered in 

 good faith, I am, gentlemen, &c.' 



In 1853 the chair of Natural History in the Uni- 

 versity of Edinburgh fell vacant. It was the place 

 which, of all others, Hugh Miller would have been 

 gratified to fill. The crisis of the Church controversy 

 had long been past, and the position of the Free Church 



