MILLER, ITuGH (1802-56). A Scottish geolo gist and man of letters, born in Cromarty, Octo ber 10. 1502. He was descended from a family of sailors. and when he was only five years of age lost his father by a storm at sea. In consequence lie was brought up chiefly under the care of two uncles. lie acquired a good knowledge of Eng lish at the Cromarty Grammar School and read 11111(.11. From his seventeenth to his thirty-seecnd year he worked as a common stonemason, and from 1834 to 1S40 was an accountant in the Cro tnarty branch of the Commercial Bank. In 1829 he published a volume entitled Poems Written in the Leisure flours of a Journeyman llason. He also made researches in Scottish antiquities, con tributed to -John M. Wilson's Tales of thy Borders (1S34), and wrote Scuts and Legends of the North of Sconomi (1835). But from his ap prenticeship as a stonemason, his studies were mainly directed toward geological formations. In 1540 he went to Edinburgh as editor of the Wit/IC:ix, a newspaper shorted in the interests of the non intrusion party in the Church of Scot. land, and in the course of the same year pub lished in its columns a series of geological ar ticles, which were afterwards collected under the title of The Old Red Sandstont, or A en, ll'a/ks in an Old field (1841). These articles contained a minute account of the author's dis covery of fossils in a formation believed, until then, to be destitute of them, and were written in a style which was a harmonious combination of strength. beauty, and polish. His editorial
labors during the heat of the disruption struggle were immense, and so seriously injured his health that for the larger part of 1545-46 he had to give up all literary activity. Ile then resumed Ids pen as editor of the Illittows, which, from 1845, when he became, with Robert Fairby, its joint owner, ceased to represent the Free Church. After ten years of hard, earnest, fagging toil, his brain gave way, and in a fit of insanity he killed himself on the night of December 2, 1856. Miller's services to science were undoubtedly great. His observation was keen and exact, his speculations most valuable. He was the first to make geology known to the general reader. He was not less distinguished as a man than as a savant. Ilis principal works, besides those already mentioned. are: First impressions of England and Its Peo ple (1846), containing many fine specimens of English descriptive prose: Footprints of the Creator. or the ..1sterolryis of Slvomtcss (1847) designed as a reply to the Vestiges of the Yatural History of Creation; 11t, sr-boots and Schoolmas ters, or the Story of My Education (1852) ; and Testimony of the Rocks (1857), an attempt to reconcile the geology of the Pentateuch with that of nature. Consult Bayne. Life and Letters of Hugh Miller (London and Boston, Mass.. 1871).