Take the case of Hugh Miller, for example. In the encyclopedias you will meet him as a famous geologist, along with great artists and inventors and statesmen and other fine company; but at first he was only a boy, like the rest of us. And he had very little chance to go to school, but he went anyhow; went to school, like Lincoln, to all the good books he could get hold of and also to the stones of the field. After a while he got so he could write books himself, and they are among the most readable books you ever saw. You just read his story of "The Old Red Sandstone," and if you don't open your eyes!
The encyclopedia will tell you a great deal about the boy himself and about "Uncle Sandy" and "Uncle James," and how they helped him. But the start of it was this:
One day a mason in Scotland[28] broke off a piece of stone—he was building a wall at the time—and inside of the stone he found—what do you think? A fish! Inside of the stone, mind you!
[28] Hugh was a Scotch boy.
Of course you won't be surprised to hear that it was a queer, outlandish sort of fish, and that it was dead. In fact, it had been dead so long that it also had turned to stone. In short, it was a fossil. But no Pharaoh in his huge pyramid ever became more famous than did that little fish in his tomb of stone.
Yet, would you believe it?—neither the mason nor his fellow workmen thought much about it. They frequently came upon these fossils and, beyond being idly curious at first, paid little attention to them.
This day, however, among these workmen was Hugh Miller, who was also a stone-mason by trade. Hugh got as excited over this fish as a boy. (He was only seventeen at the time, I believe.)
"The story of this queer fish," he said to himself, "must be as good as Sinbad the Sailor, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Jack the Giant Killer, that I used to like so well when I was a little lad;"[29] and he determined to find out all he could about it. He found from the geology books that there was much yet to be learned about such fish, and so he proceeded to study the stones. He opened the stones with his hammer as you open a book. He put in all his leisure time at this work, with the result that he not only became one of the world's famous geologists, but he wrote books in which he made it a point to tell these curious stories of ancient life in the sea, so that people without any previous scientific knowledge could read and enjoy them.
[29] He had read all these stories and a lot more, so my old Chambers' Encyclopedia says.
Besides "The Old Red Sandstone" he wrote "Footprints of the Creator," "The Testimony of the Rocks," "My Schools and School Masters," "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," and a book of poems. Not all the conclusions he came to are accepted to-day—for geology, like all the sciences, is always growing—but the history of its growth and how men reasoned things out is quite as interesting and profitable as the facts themselves, and Hugh Miller has a particularly attractive way of telling things.