SCIENCE A T LAST. 257 



low moan of the breeze, but every sound of man had 

 long passed from the air, the tones of speech and the 

 voice of singing. Alas ! we exclaimed, the Highlander 

 has at length been conquered, and the country which he 

 would have died to defend is left desolate. The track 

 of an eastern army can be traced many years after its 

 march by ruined villages and a depopulated country. 

 Prophets have described scenes of future desolation, 

 lands once populous grown " places where no man 

 dwelleth nor son of man passeth through," and here in 

 our native country is a scene calculated to illustrate the 

 terrible threatenings of prophecy, and the sad descrip- 

 tions of eastern historians/ 



Among the latest of these contributions to the 

 Inverness Courier is one which, though otherwise unim- 

 portant, is useful in a biographical point of view as 

 helping us to trace one of the most interesting stages 

 in Miller's intellectual history, the transference, namely, 

 of his enthusiasm and ambition from literature to science. 

 A short newspaper article on crab-fishing marks the 

 point at which the stream of scientific acquirement 

 which had long, with gathering volume, been flowing 

 underground, rose to the surface. Miller writes as one 

 who has from infancy been familiar with the natural 

 objects and appearances of the Cromarty beach, and 

 who had not written about them sooner merely because 

 it did not occur to him that they could afford occupation 

 to his pen. He does not yet adopt a scientific nomen- 

 clature. But he describes natural objects with exquisite 

 precision and lucidity, and dwells upon details of struct- 

 ure which the mere literary sketcher or anecdotic sports- 

 man would have regarded with indifference. He has 

 learned also to contemplate, not in vague wonder but 



VOL. I. 17 



