AucusT 28, 1902] 
NATURE 
427 
store of information and allusion which his retentive memory 
enabled him eventually to turn to excellent advantage. 
While still at school he kad gained some notice for the verses 
which he wrote. Inthe intervals of his subsequent labours with 
mallet and chisel, he continued to amuse himself in giving 
metrical expression to his feelings and reflections, grave or 
gay. Conscious of his power, though hardly yet aware in what 
direction it could best be used, he resolved to collect and publish 
his verses, At the age of seven-and-twenty he accordingly gave 
to the world a little volume with the title ‘‘ Poems written in 
the leisure hours of a Journeyman Mason.” Not without some 
misgiving, however, did he make this first literary venture. 
Even before the voices of the ‘‘ chorus of indolent reviewers” 
could travel up from the south country, with their sententious 
judgments of the merits and defects of this new peasant-poet, 
he set himself to prepare some contributions in prose which 
might perchance afford a better measure of his quality. Some 
years before that time he had been out all night with the 
herring fleet, and he now sent to the /zverness Courier some 
letters descriptive of what he had then seen. These made so 
favourable an impression that they were soon afterwards re- 
printed separately. They marked the advent of a writer gifted 
with no ordinary powers of narration and with the command of 
a pure, nervous and masculine style. The reception which 
these letters met with from men in whose judgment and taste 
he had confidence formed a turning point in his career. He 
now realised that his true strength lay, not in the writing of 
verses, but in descriptive prose. Some years, however, still 
passed before he found the class of subjects on which his pen 
could most effectively be exercised. In the meantime he began 
to record the legends and traditions of his native district. Most 
of these had been familiar to him from childhood, when he 
heard them from the lips of old grey-headed men and women, 
but they were dying out of remembrance as the older genera- 
tions passed away. Part of his leisure for several years was 
given to this pleasant task, until there grew up under his hand 
a bulky volume of manuscript. This time he was in no hurry 
to publish ; the book did not make its appearance until 1835, 
as his charming ‘‘Scenes and Legends of the North of Scot- 
land.” In this work some of the most striking passages were to 
be found, not so much in the tales themselves which were 
narrated as in the local colouring and graphic setting that were 
given to them. The writer displayed a singularly vivid power 
in the delineation of scenery, and his allusions to the geology 
the district, then almost wholly unknown, attracted attention, 
since they showed that besides his keen eye for the picturesque 
above ground, he knew something of the marvels that lay 
beneath. He was feeling his way to what ultimately became 
his most cherished and most useful task. He had realised that 
his main object should be to know what was not generally 
known, ‘‘to stand as an interpreter between nature and the 
public,” and to perform the service of narrating, as pleasingly as 
he could, the facts which he culled in walks not previously 
trodden, and of describing, as graphically as might be, the 
inferences which he drew from them. 
Ever after his first day’s experience as an apprenticed mason 
in a stone-quarry, of which he has left more than one impressive 
account, he was led to interest himself in the diversified 
characters of the rocks of the district. Even as a boy he had 
been familiar with the more obvious varieties of stone to be met 
with in a tract of country wherein the sedimentary formations of 
the Lowlands and the crystalline masses of the Highlands have 
been thrown side by side.. But he had been attracted to them 
rather on account of their singular shapes or brilliant colours 
than from any regard to what might have been their different 
modes of origin. Now, however, he had discovered that these 
rocks are really monuments, wherein are recorded portions of 
the past history of the earth, and he was full of hope that by 
patient study he might yet be ableto decipher them. The supply 
of elementary treatises and text-books of science, in the present 
day so abundant, had hardly at that time begun to come into 
existence. Geology, indeed, had but recently attained a recog- 
nised position as a distinct branch of science. .And even had 
the young.stone-mason been able to possess himself of the whole 
of the scanty geological literature of the time, it included no book 
that would have solved for him the problems that daily con- 
fronted him as he pursued his labours in the quarry, or rambled 
in leisure hours along the shore. The best treatise which could 
have fallen into his hands and which would have been full of 
enlightenment and suggestion for him—Playfair’s immortal 
NO. 1713, VOL. 66] 
} 
‘*Tllustrations of the Huttonian Theory ”—had appeared seven- 
teen years before ; but we have no evidence that it came in his 
way. He had laboriously to work out his problems for 
himself. 
Innumerable as are the subjects for geological inquiry offered 
by the district of Cromarty, it was fortunate for Hugh Miller, 
and not less so for the cause of science, that chance placed him 
face to face in the most practical way with the Old Red Sand- 
stone, and that he was, as it were, compelled to attempt to 
understand its history. While the lessons taught by the strata 
of the quarry had greatly impressed him, the abundant and well- 
preserved fossils among the Lias shales of the Eathie shore, which 
at spare moments he visited, had deepened that impression. It 
was while endeavouring to find these shales nearer home, on the 
western side of the Southern Sutor, that he stumbled upon the 
clays which contain the fish-bearing nodules of the Old Red 
Sandstone. This happy discovery, which was made in the autumn 
of 1830, the year after the publication of his ‘* Poems,” marks an 
eventful epoch in his life, as well as an important date in the 
history of geological investigation. 
At that time comparatively little was known of the Old Red 
Sandstone. Its very existence as a distinct geological system 
was disputed on the continent, where no equivalent for it had 
been recognised. It was alleged to be a mere local and acci- 
dental accumulation, which could hardly be considered as of 
much historical importance, seeing that no representative of it 
had been found beyond the British Islands. Yet within the 
limits of these islands it was certainly known to bulk in no in- 
considerable dimensions, covering many. hundreds of square 
miles and attaining a thickness of more than 10,000 feet. It 
had been clearly shown by William Smith, the father of English 
geology, to occupy a definite position beneath the Mountain 
Limestone and above the ancient ‘‘ greywacke”” which lay at 
the base of all the sedimentary series, and he had indicated its 
range over England and Wales on his map published as far 
back as 1815. In Scotland, too, its existence and importance 
as a mere mass of rock in the general framework of the country 
had long been recognised. Ami Boué had published in 1820 
an excellent account of its igneous rocks, but without any 
allusion to the organic wonders for which it was yet to become 
famous. The extraordinary abundance of its fossil fishes, where 
it spreads over Caithness, had been made known to the world by 
Murchison in 1826, and in more detail the following year, when 
Sedgwick and he read their conjoint paper on the conglomerates 
and other formations of the north of Scotland, But it may be 
doubted if any of these publications had found their way to 
Cromarty when Miller was gathering his first harvest of ichthyo- 
lites in the little bay within half a mile of the town. He had 
passed over that beach many hundreds of times in his boyhood 
without a suspicion of the treasures wrapped up in the grey 
concretions that lay tossing in the tideway. On breaking these 
stones, hoping to meet with a repetition of the Liassic organisms 
with which he had grown familar at Eathie, he found a group 
of forms wholly different. At each interval of leisure he would 
repair to the spot, and, digging out the nodules from their 
matrix of clay, would patiently split them open and arrange 
them along the higher part of the beach, according to what 
seemed to be the natural affinities of the fossils enclosed within 
them. Scouring the parish for fresh exposures of the nodule- 
bearing clay, he was soon rewarded by the discovery of some 
six or eight additional deposits charged with the same remains. 
There was a strange fascination in this pursuit. He had, as it 
were, discovered a new world. No human eye had ever before 
beheld such strange types of creation. Though he was well 
acquainted with the marine life of the adjacent firths, he had 
never seen any creature that in the least resembled them, or 
served to throw light on their structure. y 
With no chart or landmark to guide him into this new 
domain of.nature, he continued for years quietly to collect and 
compare. - The. first imperfect knowledge which he was able to 
acquire regarding the few modern representatives of the crea- 
tures disinterred by hitp at. Cromarty was derived in 1836 from 
a perusal of the: well-known memoir by Hibbert on the lime- 
stone of Burdiehouse. Next. year, however, he made the 
acquaintance of Dr. Malcolmson, who eventually carried some 
of his specimens to London and the continent, and was the 
means of bringing him into correspondence with Murchison and 
Agassiz. Hugh Miller was thus at last placed in direct com- 
munication with the world of science and into relation with the 
men who were most thoroughly versed in the subjects that had 
