Exhibiting, as it peculiarly does, almost all those objects of interest and research, Scotland has been diligently studied both by native and foreign observers; and she has sent into the geological field a distinguished group of inquirers, who have performed a noble feat in exploring the general structure of the Earth, in decyphering its ancient monuments, and in unlocking those storehouses of mineral wealth, from which civilized man derives the elements of that gigantic power which his otherwise feeble arm wields over nature.
The occurrence of shells on the highest mountains, and the remains of plants and animals, which the most superficial observer could not fail to notice, in the rocks around him, have for centuries commanded the attention and exercised the ingenuity of every student of nature. But though sparks of geological truth were from time to time elicited by speculative minds, it was not till the end of the last century that its great lights broke forth, and that it took the form and character of one of the noblest of the sciences. Without undervaluing the labors of Werner, and other illustrious foreigners, or those of our southern countrymen, Mitchell and Smith, at the close of the last century, we may characterize the commencement of the present as the brightest period of geological discovery, and place its most active locality in the northern metropolis of our island. It was doubtless from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, as a centre, that a great geological impulse was propagated southward, and it was by the collision of the Wernerian and Huttonian views, the antagonist theories of water and of fire, that men of intellectual power were summoned from other studies; and that grand truths, which fanaticism and intolerance had hitherto abjured, rose triumphant over the ignorance and bigotry of the age. The Geological Society of London, which doubtless sprung from the excitement in the Scottish metropolis, entered on the new field of research with a faltering step. The prejudices of the English mind had been marshalled with illiberal violence against the Huttonian doctrines. Infidelity and Atheism were charged against their supporters; and had there been a Protestant Inquisition in England at that period of general political excitement, the geologists of the north would have been immured in its deepest dungeons.
Truth, however, marched apace; and though her simple but majestic procession be often solemn and slow, and her votaries few and dejected, yet on this, as on every occasion, she triumphed over the most inveterate prepossessions, and finally took up her abode in those very halls and institutions where she had been persecuted and reviled. When their science had been thus acquitted of the charge of impiety and irreligion, the members of the Geological Society left their humble and timid position of being the collectors only of the materials of future generalizations, and became at once the most successful observers of geological phenomena, and the boldest asserters of geological truth.
In this field of research, in which the physical, as well as the intellectual, frame of the philosopher is made tributary to science, two of our countrymen—Sir Roderick Murchison and Sir Charles Lyell—have been among our most active laborers. From the study of their native glens, these distinguished travellers, like the Humboldts and the Von Buchs of the continent, have passed into foreign lands, exploring the north and the south of Europe, and extending their labors to the eastern ranges of the Ural and the Timan, and to the Apallachians and the Alleghanies in the far west. But while our two countrymen were interrogating the strata of other lands, many able and active laborers had been at work in their own.
Among the eminent students of the structure of the earth, Mr. Hugh Miller holds a lofty place, not merely from the discovery of new and undescribed organisms in the Old Red Sandstone, but from the accuracy and beauty of his descriptions, the purity and elegance of his composition, and the high tone of philosophy and religion which distinguishes all his writings. Mr. Miller is one of the few individuals in the history of Scottish science who have raised themselves above the labors of an humble profession, by the force of their genius and the excellence of their character, to a comparatively high place in the social scale. Mr. Telford, like Mr. Miller, followed the profession of a stone-mason, before his industry and self-tuition qualified him for the higher functions of an architect and an engineer. And Mr. Watt and Mr. Rennie rose to wealth and fame without the aid of a university education. But, distinguished as these individuals were, none of them possessed those qualities of mind which Mr. Miller has exhibited in his writings; and, with the exception of Burns, the uneducated genius which has done honor to Scotland during the last century, has never displayed that mental refinement, and classical taste, and intellectual energy, which mark all the writings of our author. We wish that we could have gratified our readers with an authentic and even detailed narrative of the previous history of so remarkable a writer, and of the steps by which his knowledge was acquired, and the difficulties which he encountered in its pursuit; but though this is not, to any great extent, in our power, we shall at least be able, chiefly from Mr. Miller’s own writings, to follow him throughout his geological career.
Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty, of humble but respectable parents, whose history would have possessed no inconsiderable interest, even if it had not derived one of a higher kind from the genius and fortunes of their child. By the paternal side he was descended from a race of sea-faring people, whose family burying-ground, if we judge from the past, seems to be the sea. Under its green waves his father sleeps: his grandfather, his two granduncles, one of whom sailed round the world with Anson, lie also there; and the same extensive cemetery contains the relics of several of his more distant relatives. His father was but an infant of scarcely a year old, at the death of our author’s grandfather, and had to commence life as a poor ship-boy; but such was the energy of his mind, that, when little turned of thirty, he had become the master and owner of a fine large sloop, and had built himself a good house, which entitled his son to the franchise on the passing of the Reform Bill. Having unfortunately lost his sloop in a storm, he had to begin the world anew, and he soon became master and owner of another, and would have thriven, had he lived; but the hereditary fate was too strong for him, and when our author was a little boy of five summers, his father’s fine new sloop foundered at sea in a terrible tempest, and he and his crew were never more heard of. Mr. Miller had two sisters younger than himself, both of whom died ere they attained to womanhood. His mother experienced the usual difficulties which a widow has to encounter in the decent education of her family; but she struggled honestly and successfully, and ultimately found her reward in the character and fame of her son. It is from this excellent woman that Mr. Miller has inherited those sentiments and feelings which have given energy to his talents as the defender of revealed truth, and the champion of the Church of his fathers. She was the great granddaughter of a venerable man, still well known to tradition in the north of Scotland as Donald Roy of Nigg,—a sort of northern Peden, who is described in the history of our Church as the single individual who, at the age of eighty, when the presbytery of the district had assembled in the empty church for the purpose of inducting an obnoxious presentee, had the courage to protest against the intrusion, and to declare “that the blood of the people of Nigg would be required at their hands, if they settled a man to the walls of that church.” Tradition has represented him as a seer of visions, and a prophesier of prophecies; but whatever credit may be given to stories of this kind, which have been told also of Knox, Welsh, and Rutherford, this ancient champion of Non-Intrusion was a man of genuine piety, and the savor of his ennobling beliefs and his strict morals has survived in his family for generations. If the child of such parents did not receive the best education which his native town could afford, it was not their fault, nor that of his teacher. The fetters of a gymnasium are not easily worn by the adventurous youth who has sought and found his pleasures among the hills and on the waters. They chafe the young and active limb that has grown vigorous under the blue sky, and never known repose but at midnight. The young philosopher of Cromarty was a member of this restless community; and he had been the hero of adventures and accidents among rocks and woods, which are still remembered in his native town. The parish school was therefore not the scene of his enjoyments; and while he was a truant, and, with reverence be it spoken, a dunce, while under its jurisdiction, he was busy in the fields and on the sea-shore in collecting those stores of knowledge which he was born to dispense among his fellow-men. He escaped, however, from school, with the knowledge of reading, writing, and a little arithmetic, and with the credit of uniting a great memory with a little scholarship. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, Cuvier, he had studied Natural History in the fields and among the mountains ere he had sought for it in books; while the French philosopher had become a learned naturalist before he had even looked upon the world of Nature. This singular contrast is not difficult to explain. With a sickly constitution and a delicate frame, the youthful Cuvier wanted that physical activity which the observation of Nature demands. Our Scottish geologist, on the contrary, in vigorous health, and with an iron frame, rushed to the rocks and the sea-shore in search of the instruction which was not provided for him at school, and which he could find no books to supply.
After receiving this measure of education, Mr. Miller set out in February, 1821, with a heavy heart, as he himself confesses, “to make his first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint:”—
“I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his ‘Twa Dogs’ as one of the most disagreeable of all employments—to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods,—a reader of curious books, when I could get them,—a gleaner of old traditionary stories,—and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith, rather, (the Bay of Cromarty,) with a little, clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, and which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet.”—Old Red Sandstone, p. 4.
After removing the loose fragments below, picks and wedges and levers were applied in vain by our author and his brother workmen to tear up and remove the huge strata beneath. Blasting by gunpowder became necessary. A mass of the diluvial clay came tumbling down, “bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter.” While admiring the pretty cock goldfinch, and the light-blue and grayish-yellow woodpecker, and moralizing on their fate, the workmen were ordered to lay aside their tools, and thus ended the first day’s labor of our young geologist. The sun was then sinking behind the thick fir wood behind him, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching to the shore. Notwithstanding his blistered hands, and the fatigue which blistered them, he found himself next morning as light of heart as his fellow-laborers, and able to enjoy the magnificent scenery around him, which he thus so beautifully describes:—
“There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky; and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight on the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards; and then, as reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple.”—Old Red Sandstone, pp. 6, 7.