Fishes. 43 



the necessity of any editorial comments on the style and manner of 

 the volume in question, yet leaves untouched the more pleasing task 

 of investigating its contents. 



. It should perhaps be stated that about one third of the work con- 

 sists of a series of sketches, written for, and originally published in, 

 ' The Witness ' newspaper ; these sketches have expanded into a vo- 

 lume of 300 pages, and the reading public has abundant cause to be 

 gratified with the expansion. Mr. Miller commences his task with 

 some advice to working men, showing them what is their true policy, 

 and recommending them to abstain from chartist meetings, and make 

 a right use of their eyes : — " the commonest things are worth looking 

 at — even stones, and weeds, and the most familiar animals ": he then 

 relates how, when " a slim loose-jointed boy," he set out a little be- 

 fore sunrise, to make his first acquaintance with a life of labour in one 

 of its most disagreeable forms — to work in a quarry. In this occupa- 

 tion his interest was greatly excited by the appearance of a platform 

 of rock laid bare by the power of gunpowder : " the entire surface was 

 ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the 

 tide an hour before." He " could trace every bend and curvature, 

 every cross hollow and counter-ridge of the corresponding phenome- 

 na; for the resemblance was no half resemblance, it was the thing 

 itself." Fresh causes of wonder and admiration continued to break 

 on the mind of the young quarry-man, until he found that the life of 

 labour was not without its sweets : but when, a few days afterwards, 

 he was removed to another quarry, " in a lofty wall of cliffs that 

 overhang the north shore of the Moray Frith," when in the course of 

 the first day's employment he picked up a nodular mass of blue lime- 

 stone, and laid it open by a stroke of his hammer, the blow revealing 

 to his delighted and astonished eye "a beautifully finished piece of 

 sculpture — one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital," — 

 then he became a geologist, his fate was sealed, the foundation of his 

 fame was laid, for with that discovery there seemed to rise within him 

 a desire for knowledge only to be increased as knowledge was attained. 

 Time passed on, and Mr. Miller became a scientific geologist ; we 

 soon find him emerging from the infantile wonderer at a beautiful fos- 

 sil, and writing, in the learned phraseology of a professor, of " an 

 enoimous deposit of dark-coloured bituminous schist, slightly mica- 

 ceous, calcareous, or semi-calcareous — here and there interlaced with 

 veins of carbonate of lime — here and there compact and highly siliceous, 



&c."— -writfiig, in fact, like the veriest sages of the science : but let us 

 turn from scientific disquisitions on strata to the more interesting no- 



