Landscape in History, and Other Essays

by Archibald Geikie

In order adequately to realise the nature and extent of the work achieved by Hugh Miller during his too brief career, we should clearly picture to ourselves the peculiar conditions in which he grew up. Happily he has himself, in one of the most charming pieces of autobiography in the language, told the story of his youth and early manhood. Descended from both a Highland and a Lowland ancestry, he combined in his nature the vivid imagination and poetic impulse of the Celt with the more staid and logical temperament of the Teuton. He was born amidst an English-speaking community, but at a distance of only a few miles from the fringe of the mountainous region within which men use the Gaelic tongue. He knew some survivors of Culloden, and had heard his own grandfather tell how, when a stripling, he watched, from the hills above Cromarty, the smoke wreaths of the battle as they drifted along the ridge on the further side of the Moray Firth. From infancy he was personally familiar with the people of the hills and their traditions, as well as with the ways of the hardy fisher-folk and farmers of the plains. The hereditary predispositions of his mind were in this way fostered by contact with the two races from which they sprang.

Happy in the possession of this racial blending, he was still more fortunate in the place of his birth. He used to remark with satisfaction that both Sir Roderick Murchison and he had been born on the Old Red Sandstone of the Black Isle; but while the career of the author of the Silurian System owed practically nothing to his birth-place, which he left while still an infant, Miller's life from beginning to end bore the impress of the surroundings amid which he was born and educated. It would hardly be possible to choose in this country a place of which the varied features are more admirably fitted to stimulate the observing faculties, to foster a love of nature, and to appeal to the poetic imagination than the winding shores, the scarped cliffs, the tangled woods, the wild boulder-strewn moors and distant sweep of blue mountains around Cromarty. And how often and lovingly are these scenes portrayed by him under every varying phase of weather and season! They had stamped themselves into his very soul and had become an integral part of his being.

'The sounding cataract

Haunted him like a passion; the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms were then to him

An appetite, a feeling, and a love.'

But while Nature was his first and best teacher, he has told us in grateful words how much he owed to two uncles—hard-working, sagacious, and observant men, by whom his young eyes were trained to discriminate flower and tree, bird and insect, together with the teeming organisms of the shore, and whose high moral worth he, even as a boy, could appreciate. Having learnt to read while still of tender years, he developed an insatiable thirst for books. What he acquired in this way for himself seems to have been at least as useful as the training gained during the rather desultory years spent by him at the town grammar-school. He was an intelligent but wayward boy, as much ahead of his schoolmates in general information as in all madcap adventures among the crags and woods. When the time arrived at which he had to choose his calling in life, he selected an occupation that would still enable him to spend his days in the open air and gratify his overmastering propensity for natural history pursuits. Much to the chagrin of his family he determined to be a stone-mason, and at the age of 17 was apprenticed to that trade. For some fifteen years he continued to work in quarries and in the erection of buildings in various districts of the north country, and even extended his experience for a short time into Midlothian. Deeply interesting and instructive is the record he has left of these years of mechanical toil. But amidst all the hardships and temptations of the life, the purity and strength of his character bore him nobly through. His keen love of nature and his intense enjoyment of books were a never-failing solace. He continued to gain access to, and even by degrees to possess, a considerable body of the best literature in our language, reading some of his favourite authors over twice in a year. He thus laid up a store of information and allusion which his retentive memory enabled him eventually to turn to excellent advantage.