Hugh Miller

by W. Keith Leask

We have said that those who ultimately live in each branch of science are few. It is only by the combination in perfection of imagination and observation that success is ensured. Miller had noticed in the writer of the Vestiges the absence of original observation and abstract thinking, or the power of seeing and reasoning for himself. In truth, there is something in geological speculation akin to what Professor Jebb has noticed in the field of classical emendation and of textual criticism, especially in Germany, where scholarship is a crowded profession, and eminence is often temporarily won by boldness of handling the texts. But even Ritschl, with all his heavy apparatus of learning, singularly fails in comparison with the sagacity of Bentley or the instinct of Porson. What habits of classical verse-composition had done for these scholars is brought to the geologist by observation. This, in unison with creative mental power, will alone preserve the name of the natural scientist. The first has kept White of Selborne a literary evergreen: the second has maintained his place for Cuvier. Miller's own friend, Dr. Longmuir, rightly singles out this Champollion-like trait of sagacity as his most characteristic feature, by which 'he seemed by intuition to perceive what cost other minds no small amount of careful investigation.' He was very cautious in statement, and laborious in the acquisition of his data. In his works the reader will find no second-hand statements, no airy generalisation; even in fields where special research in minute departments had been by circumstances denied to him, his gift of constructive imagination often enables him to supply such defects as later investigators may have detected and added. 'The more,' says Professor Huxley, I study the fishes of the Old Red, the more I am struck by the patience and sagacity manifested in his researches, and by the natural insight which, in his case, seems to have supplied the want of special anatomical knowledge.'

And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot fail to be struck with the pertinence of his quotations and illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful memory and a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go to memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for his facts. Both came easily and naturally; and his writing, even in its most sustained flights, shows no signs of effort. Some critics have detected in his style an element of exuberance; and this may be allowed in his narrative and descriptive passages. There would appear to have been, as it were, a Celtic lobe of imagination in his mind for the feeling of discursive description and external nature. Thus, in his slightest landscapes his imagination or eye is not satisfied with the few bold touches such as Carlyle would, after his manner, throw upon the canvas. It expands, like the method of Ruskin, over the surface. But in each case the defect is the result of original endowment. The eye, he says, had been in his case exclusively trained as a mason, and this habit of seeing the projected line complete from the beginning was at the bottom of his often spoiling the effect of his narrative with flamboyant additions, through his possession of the geological eye for its conformation in detail. Johnson said of Thomson that he had a true poetical genius—the power of seeing even a pair of candles in a poetical light. The landscape became to Miller at once anatomised into its geological aspects.

But in his strictly scientific passages this is not so. There the style is simple in expression and close in reasoning. When we consider the great amount of solid literary performance, and of minute observation, recorded in his Cruise of the Betsey and his Rambles of a Geologist, extending over the West Coast and the Orkneys—when we know that much of his work consisted of papers in The Witness, republished, like The Old Red Sandstone, in book form with the necessary additions, we shall wonder at the fertility and the quickness of the mind that could, in the midst of distracting journalistic demands on his time and attention, produce such a mass of varied and finished work in science and literature. And of the work in The Witness as a political writer, we need only say that the present ecclesiastical condition of Scotland bears largely his impress. Till he came and gave expression to the feeling of the country in the columns of his paper, the people had to a considerable extent believed the question at issue to be one that concerned mainly the clergy. This had been the standpoint of the Moderate organs, in a wary attempt to win over the laity. But by the Letter to Brougham he won the ear of the people, and to the end he never lost it. By 1841 the political candidates in Scotland at the general election had proclaimed themselves, with a single exception, in favour of some distinct alteration of the law of patronage. Whether Church papers are or are not a blessing—in England they have become a menace to political action and a medium for the most offensive clericalism and reactionary measures—may safely be left out of account in settling the question in his own case, for, as we have seen, he had never consented to make his paper a merely ecclesiastical organ. But of the work which he accomplished as a leader-writer and as an exponent of popular rights we have the unhesitating estimate of Guthrie: 'The battle of Christ's rights as Head of the Church, and of the people's rights as members of the body of which He is the Head, was fought and won in every town and a large number of the parishes of Scotland, mainly by Hugh Miller, through the columns of The Witness newspaper.' Of it he himself, in the closing sentences of the Schools and Schoolmasters, could say with modesty that it took its place among our first-class Scottish newspapers, and that it numbered among its subscribers a larger percentage of readers with a university education than any other. Nor would he, perhaps, have considered it as among the least of his journalistic successes that his name and connection could win for the elder Bethune, at the close of his wintry day, the proposed editorship of the Dumfries Standard, which would have done much to have brightened the life of his old fellow-contributor to Wilson's Border Tales had not the poet been removed before him by death.

In science there are stars and stars, to borrow the adage of Thackeray upon men. There are stars that are fixed. In his own line of geology, as an inspirationist, we think his name will not soon pass away. There may be defects of knowledge, but there is no defect of spirit; and here we cannot do better than set down the opinion of his friend, Sir Archibald Geikie, who has a connection both with Miller and with Murchison through his occupancy of the Murchisonian Chair of Geology in the University of Edinburgh. Both Miller and Murchison came out of the Black Isle. In a communication to us of the date 22nd December 1895, he thus writes:—

'Hugh Miller will always occupy a peculiar place in the history of geology, and in the ranks of geological literature. He was not in any sense a trained geologist. He lacked the habit of patient and detailed investigation in departments of the science that did not specially interest him, but which were essential as a basis of accurate induction and successful speculation. In all that relates to the stratigraphical sequence of the formations, for example, he accepted what had been done by others without any critical examination of it. Thus, in his own region—the north of Scotland—he believed that a girdle of Old Red Sandstone nearly encircles the older crystalline rocks of Ross and Sutherland—a view then generally adopted. Yet he had actually walked over ground where, with even an elementary knowledge of structural geology, he could have corrected the prevalent error. It is, of course, no reproach to him that he left matters as he found them in that respect; his genius did not find in such questions the appropriate field of its exertion.

'Nor though he occupied himself all through his life with fossils, can he be called a palæontologist. He had no education in comparative anatomy, and was thus incompetent to deal adequately as a naturalist with the organisms which he discovered. He was himself perfectly conscious of the limitations of his powers in this department, and thus wisely refrained from burdening the literature of science with descriptions and names which would have been revised, and perhaps entirely recast, by some subsequent more competent biologist.

'Hugh Miller's unique position is that of a poetic student of the geological side of Nature, who possessed an unrivalled gift of vividly communicating to others the impressions made on his own mind by the observation of geological fact and by the inferences which such observation seemed to warrant. His lively imagination led him to seize more especially on those aspects of the past history of the earth which could be most vividly realised. He loved to collect the plants and animals of which the remains have been entombed among the rocks, and to re-people with them the scenes in which they lived long ages ago. Each scattered fact was marshalled by his eager fancy into its due place in the mental picture which he drew of such long-vanished lands, lakes, rivers, and seas. His enthusiasm supplied details where facts were wanting, and enabled him to kindle in his readers not a little of the burning interest which he felt himself.

'Long study of the best English literature had given Miller a rare mastery of his mother tongue. For elegance of narrative combined with clearness and vividness of description, I know no writing in the whole of scientific literature superior, or, indeed, perhaps equal to his. There can be no doubt that this literary gift, appealing as it did to so wide a circle of readers, formed a chief source of the influence which he exerted among his contemporaries. It was this that enabled him to spread so widely a curiosity to know something of geological science, and an interest in the progress of geological discovery. I do not think that the debt which geology owes to him for these services, in deepening the popular estimation of the science, and in increasing the number of its devotees, has ever been sufficiently acknowledged. During his lifetime, and for some years afterwards, Hugh Miller was looked upon by the general body of his countrymen as the leading geologist of his day. And this exaggerated but very natural estimate spread perhaps even more extensively in the United States. His books were to be found in the remotest log-hut of the Far West, and on both sides of the Atlantic ideas of the nature and scope of geology were largely drawn from them.

'Of the extent and value of Miller's original contributions to geology I am, perhaps, hardly fitted to speak. He was one of my earliest and kindest scientific friends. He used to relate to me the results of his summer rambles before he had time to set them down in writing. He admitted me into the intimacy of his inner thoughts on geological questions and controversies. He brought me completely under the spell of his personal charm, and filled me with an enthusiastic love for the man as well as a passionate admiration for the geologist. Nor has the glamour of that early friendship passed away. I would rather leave to others the invidious task of coldly dissecting Hugh Miller's work and seeing how much of it has been a permanent addition to science, and how much has passed away with the crudities of advancing knowledge. I will only say that there cannot be any doubt that his contributions to the stock of geological fact were much less important than the influence which his writings ever had in furthering the spread of an appreciation of geological science throughout the English-speaking world.

'There were two departments in which his best original work was done. One of these was the Old Red Sandstone, where he laid the foundations of his fame as an observer and describer of Nature. His unwearied devotion to the task of collecting the fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, and his patient industry in piecing their broken fragments together, opened up a new chapter in the history of Life on our globe. The other department was that which embraces the story of the Ice Age. Miller was one of the pioneers in the study of the Boulder-Clay. The last years of his life were more especially devoted to that interesting formation in which he found fossil shells in many parts of Scotland where they had never been found before. I well remember my last interview with him, only a few evenings before his death. He had spent a short holiday in the low ground about Bucklyvie between the Forth and Clyde, and had collected a number of marine shells, which led him to draw a graphic picture of what must have been the condition of central Scotland during a part of the glacial period. On the same occasion he questioned me as usual about my own geological doings. I had been surveying in detail the geological structure of Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh, and showed him my maps. He went over them with lively comments, and, when he had done, turned round to his eldest daughter, then a girl at school, and gave her in his own pictorial way a sketch of the history of the volcano that had piled up the picturesque hill on the eastern outskirts of the city.