HUGH MILLER 109 



In 1844 he set out on a geological ramble round 

 the Hebrides in the floating manse, * The Betsey] by 

 which the Church served the islands in the west, owing 

 to the refusal of sites by Lord Macdonald and others. 

 The yacht was but thirty feet by eleven, and there 

 with his old Cromarty friend Swanson, the 'outed' 

 minister of the Small Isles, he learned the hardships 

 to which the miserable policy of the landlords had ex- 

 posed the poor Highlanders. But if ' the earth was 

 the lairds' and the fulness thereof/ the water was not ! 

 The building in which the congregation met was of 

 turf ' the minister encased in his ample-skirted storm- 

 jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a genuine 

 sou'wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped 

 half a yard down his back ; and I, closely wrapped up 

 in my grey maud, which proved, however, a rather in- 

 different protection, against the penetrating powers of a 

 Hebridean drizzle.' In none of his works does he ex- 

 hibit a happier descriptive view than in The Cruise of 

 the Betsey, though in popularity it has been surpassed 

 by his First Impressions of England, where he records 

 the results of an eight weeks' tour, in 1845, from New- 

 castle to London, passing York, Birmingham, and 

 Stratford on the way. In 1847 he published his Foot- 

 prints of the Creator, in reply to the Vestiges by Robert 

 Chambers, in which he seeks to controvert the theory 

 of development, at least in the form in which it was 

 then presented, by attempting to prove the fishes and 

 the fossils of the Old Red to be as advanced in character 



