iii 



voted himself to the study of crystallography. Miller was attracted 

 to the same subject ; and four years later, when Professor Whewell 

 ^resigned, he used his influence to obtain the chair for his pupil. Thus, 

 in the year 1832, Miller was elected to the post, the duties of which 

 became the chief work of his long and laborious life. 



In 1838 Professor Miller was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 

 In 1841 he proceeded to the degree of Doctor of Medicine. To this 

 temporary diversion from more congenial studies he was compelled 

 by the statutes which at that time governed the College. These 

 required that all the Fellows, after a certain time, should be in 

 Holy Orders, with the exception of four, two of whom were to be 

 students of medicine. To one of these Fellowships Professor Miller 

 was transferred in the year 1834; but it is needless to add that, 

 though he complied with the requirements of the statute, he made no 

 attempt to follow medicine as a profession. In 1844 he vacated his 

 Fellowship at the College, by marriage, in accordance with the existing 

 statutes. However, thirty years afterwards he was again elected a 

 Fellow of his old College, under the statute (granted in 1860) em- 

 powering the Society to elect as Fellows persons eminent for science 

 or learning, though in other respects technically disqualified. But 

 Professor Miller's work was now drawing near its end. From his 

 youth he had been a hard worker, and had lived perhaps almost too 

 sparingly. He delivered his lectures as usual in the earlier part of 

 1876, but a change in the expression of his face began to be rather 

 marked, which seemed to forebode a giving way of his robust constitu- 

 tion, and caused anxiety to his friends. Their fears were not ground- 

 less. In the October term of 1876 a short course of lectures which he 

 had announced was interrupted by a slight stroke of paralysis. This 

 proved the beginning of the end. He was never able to meet his 

 class again, and the duties of the chair were henceforth discharged by 

 a deputy. Very slowly, but very surely, his vital powers declined — a 

 torpor stealing alike over mind and body — till at last he fell asleep on 

 the 20th May of the present year (1880). 



Professor Miller's name is inseparably connected with two important 

 branches of scientific work. The first of these belongs, as might be 

 expected, to mineralogy. "Crystallography," as it has been said, " was 

 Miller's science. It had taken its first shape in the hands of Haiiy 

 in the decade of years before he was born, and in those of Weiss, of 

 Mohs, and especially of Franz Ernst Neumann and of Grassmann ; it 

 had been receiving development during the years of Miller's youth 

 and manhood." To this his predecessor, Professor Whewell, had con- 

 tributed by an important memoir on the geometrical treatment of 

 crystal forms, published in the " Transactions of the Cambridge 

 Philosophical Society." u Taking this memoir and Neumann's treatise 

 of 1823 ('Beitrage zur Krystallonomie ') as his starting point, 



