HUGH MILLER 151 



I shall never cease to look back upon their influence with 

 gratitude. They ought to be far more widely read than 

 they seem now to be. Assuredly no young geologist will 

 find more stimulating chapters than those penned by the 

 author of the Old Red Sandstone? 



The statue erected to him by his countrymen presents 

 to the eye of the traveller one of the most striking features 

 of the landscape as he approaches the little town of 

 Cromarty. No more fitting scene could be found than 

 that which commands the magnificent sweep of water 

 over which Miller's eye had ranged when a boy. Of 

 the Scott Monument in Edinburgh he had said that 

 no monument could be in keeping and in character 

 that was not Gothic ; and no one to himself could be 

 true that forgot the interpreter of the Old Red Sand- 

 stone. As late as 1836, Buckland in his Bridgewater 

 Treatise had briefly dismissed it, and it was a new 

 revelation in geology to make known its scientific 

 importance. In dedicating the book to Sir Roderick 

 Murchison, who had been born at Taradale on the 

 Beauly Firth in 1792, he could say that Smith, the 

 father of English geology, had been born upon the 

 Oolite : they, he added, had been born upon the Old 

 Red. Rarely could nature afford a more striking 

 example of the true and the picturesque, than in 

 these two widely differing memorials, the one in the 

 Princes Street of his c own romantic town,' the other 

 looking over the expanse of the Cromarty Firth. In 

 life these men had never met, and in type they were 



