POPULARITY OF HIS WRITINGS 275 



of the facts and inferences which they express, there 

 lie the most vital truths in regard to the world in 

 which we live. He clothed the dry bones of science 

 with living flesh and blood. He made the aspects 

 of past ages to stand out picturesquely before us, as his 

 vivid imagination conceived that they must once have 

 been. He awakened an enthusiasm for geological 

 questions, such as had never before existed, and this 

 wave of popular appreciation which he set in motion 

 has never since ceased to pulsate throughout the 

 English-speaking peoples of the world. His genial 

 ardour and irresistible eloquence swept away the last 

 remnants of the barrier of orthodox prejudice against 

 geology in this country. The present generation can 

 hardly realise the former strength of that bigotry, or 

 appreciate the merit of the service rendered in the 

 breaking of it down. The well-known satirical criti- 

 cism of the poet Cowper 1 expressed a prevalent feeling 

 among the orthodox of his day, and this feeling was 

 still far from extinct when Miller began to write. I 

 can recall manifestations of it even within my own 

 experience. No one, however, could doubt his 

 absolute orthodoxy, and when the cause of the science 

 was so vigorously espoused by him, the voices of the 

 objectors were finally silenced. There was another 

 class of cavillers who looked on geology as a mere 

 collecting of minerals, a kind of laborious trifling 

 concealed under a cover of uncouth technical terms. 

 Their view was well expressed by Wordsworth when 

 he singled out for contemptuous scorn the enthusiast 

 who carried a pocket hammer with which he chipped 



1 See ante, p. 128. 



