'I count it as one of the privileges of my life to have known Hugh Miller, and as one of its chief losses that he was so suddenly removed when I had hardly realised the full value of his friendship and of his genial enthusiasm. His writings formed my earliest geological text-books, and I shall never cease to look back upon their influence with gratitude. They ought to be far more widely read than they seem now to be. Assuredly no young geologist will find more stimulating chapters than those penned by the author of the Old Red Sandstone.'
The statue erected to him by his countrymen presents to the eye of the traveller one of the most striking features of the landscape as he approaches the little town of Cromarty. No more fitting scene could be found than that which commands the magnificent sweep of water over which Miller's eye had ranged when a boy. Of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh he had said that no monument could be in keeping and in character that was not Gothic; and no one to himself could be true that forgot the interpreter of the Old Red Sandstone. As late as 1836, Buckland in his Bridgewater Treatise had briefly dismissed it, and it was a new revelation in geology to make known its scientific importance. In dedicating the book to Sir Roderick Murchison, who had been born at Taradale on the Beauly Firth in 1792, he could say that Smith, the father of English geology, had been born upon the Oolite: they, he added, had been born upon the Old Red. Rarely could nature afford a more striking example of the true and the picturesque, than in these two widely differing memorials, the one in the Princes Street of his 'own romantic town,' the other looking over the expanse of the Cromarty Firth. In life these men had never met, and in type they were totally distinct. Yet in the great features of integrity and force of character no two men could more strikingly agree. Both wrote with their eyes on the object, and both were loyal to fact. Of Miller we may say what Carlyle had said of Sir Walter, that no sounder piece of British manhood had been put together in this century of time, and that, when he departed, he took a man's life along with him.
A man of the people, he was understood by the people; and he wished it to be so. When we passed through the Sutors of Cromarty some years ago, about six in the morning of a fine summer day, there was a sailor at the wheel on the bridge. Under the belief that we were strangers to the locality, he pointed out the statue in the distance and gave an account, correct in the main, of what Miller had been and what he had done. In dwelling upon the life the narrator seemed to borrow respect for the dignity of all labour and of his own calling. Goldsmith thought of Burke that in giving up to party what was meant for mankind he had narrowed his mental powers and lessened his influence and force. It may be that there are some who think that, in doing the ecclesiastical work which he accomplished, he had given up to the Church of Scotland in all her branches what was meant for science. Such a judgment would be incorrect; it would certainly be one which would but feebly reflect the convictions of all Scotchmen. It is a true remark of the elder Disraeli that few men of science have either by their work or in their life influenced the staple of the thinking of humanity. To influence a whole people is certainly given but rarely to any one man. But to mould the opinions of his countrymen in a lasting sense,—and no higher object would he have desired—was no less certainly given to Hugh Miller.
[4] ] Testimony of the Rocks, pp. 186-191, ed. 1857.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1829. Poems written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason. Inverness.
1829. Letters on the Herring Fishery. Inverness (reprint from Inverness Courier).
1835. Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland; or, The Traditional History of Cromarty. Edinburgh.
1839. Letter from one of the Scottish People to the Right Hon. Lord Brougham and Vaux, on the opinions expressed by his lordship on the Auchterarder case. Edinburgh.
1839. The Whiggism of the Old School as exemplified by the Past History and Present Position of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh.