Louis Campion Miall. 



xin 



■Committee, who took a great interest in the young Secretary and influenced 

 him in many ways. 



In the course of these excursions quite a respectable collection of fossils 

 and geological specimens was made for the Bradford Museum. Then a great 

 piece of luck befel the Curator. One day there came into his office a coal 

 miner bringing some curious bones that he had found in the Low Moor coal 

 mine. Miall went to see them himself next day, going down a coal mine for 

 the first time in his life. He was shown the bones on the roof of a passage 

 in the works, and realised that they would require very careful treatment if 

 they were to be removed without injury. So it was decided to apply a 

 layer of plaster of Paris to protect the bones and then to have the coal 

 carefully worked away, a prop being placed to support the fragments covered 

 with plaster. The bones were removed in perfect condition except for those 

 that had already been broken off. The block removed was 11 feet long and 

 a couple of feet wide. Investigations proved that the bones belonged to a 

 Labyrinthodont of a species that was hitherto unknown. On the suggestion 

 •of the Committee, Miall wrote to Prof. Huxley and offered to take the 

 fossil to London and show it to him. Huxley sent an encouraging reply, the 

 fossil was carefully packed in a wooden case and taken to London, where it 

 was examined with much interest by Prof. Huxley and Prof. Flower. 

 Huxley undertook to write a description of it for the Geological Society and 

 asked Miall to prepare a short account of its discovery and removal from the 

 coal mine. At the next meeting of the Geological Society, Miall read his 

 paper and Huxley gave a simple and interesting account of the new 

 Labyrinthodont, without notes, explaining it from the specimen as he went 

 along. Sir Charles Lyell was present and seemed to be much interested. 



"When Miall returned to Bradford and gave the Committee of the 

 Philosophical Society a vivid account of what had passed, they asked him to 

 repeat the story in the form of a lecture to the Society. It was his first 

 public lecture. After spending a good deal of time trying to write it out, 

 he resolved to follow Huxley's example and speak without notes, explaining 

 the actual specimen before the audience. There was a good attendance, for 

 the matter had aroused interest in Bradford, and the lecture went off very 

 well. That was the beginning of Miall's career as a public lecturer. After 

 that we find him giving courses of Lectures in Bradford and Leeds mostly on 

 Geology, but also on Botany and the " Early History of Domestic Animals." 



Though very shy and studious, Miall seems to have entered somewhat 

 into the social life of Bradford, which happened to be unusually interesting 

 at that time. He was fond of music, and indeed had studied it in his usual 

 way by sheer force of will and without a teacher, so that he had written 

 songs for his sister and could play to some extent on two or three instruments. 

 He also had a good deal of talent for painting. He brought back from a cruise 

 in the Hebrides in 1868 sketches from which he made some clever little 

 water-colour pictures, that still hang beside one or two of his father's in 

 homes of a younger generation. 



