EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS. 11 



to say on this point. Modern science tends to show 

 that there was more in Mr Shandy's philosophy of cha- 

 racter than Sterne's humour gives account of, and that, 

 if we can rightly estimate the effect of local circumstance 

 and other influences to modify or to transmute, the 

 ground-plan of a man's character may be found written 

 in his bones. Hugh Miller's father was at the time of 

 his birth a man of forty-four ; mature in every faculty ; of 

 marked individuality and iron wilL His mother was a 

 girl of eighteen, who had been brought up at her hus- 

 band's knee, and had learned to revere him as a father 

 before she accepted him as a lover. Throughout life she 

 displayed no special force of mind or character. The 

 first child of such a marriage was likely to bear the in- 

 delible stamp of his father's manhood. 



Fancy delights to construct oracles from the earliest 

 recollections of men who have become famous. We 

 must guard against attaching too much importance to 

 the infantile reminiscences of Miller. Those he mentions 

 are graceful in themselves, and form a singularly appro- 

 priate introduction to the life of a man of science. He 

 remembered going into the garden one day before com- 

 pleting his third year, and seeing there ' a minute 

 duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of 

 the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its 

 flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red colour/ 

 The ' duckling,' he tells us, belonged to the vegetable 

 kingdom, though he could no longer identify it; the 

 mussel-bearing plant was, he believed, a scarlet-runner. 

 If there is in this incident anything unusual, it is the 

 circumstance that natural phenomena of form and colour, 

 so simple and common, should have powerfully affected 

 the imagination of a child not three years old. The 

 incidents first stored in memory are generally those of 



