Miller, HUGH, a distinguished self-taught geologist and journalist, was born at Cromarty, in the north of Scotland, October 10, 1802. He was descended from a family of sailors, and lost his own father by a storm at sea when he was only five years of age. In consequence of this misfortune he was brought up chiefly under the care of two of his mother's uncles, one of whom ('Uncle Sandy') imbued him with a taste for natural history, and the other ('Uncle James') for traditional lore. He acquired a good knowledge of English (the only language he knew) at the Cromarty grammar-school. Before his eleventh year he had read the usual romances of childhood, besides other works of higher literary pretensions. As he grew older he became extremely fond of the great English poets and prose-writers. From his seventeenth to his thirty-fourth year he worked as a common stone-mason, devoting the enforced leisure of the winter months to writing and reading, to independent researches in natural history, and to the extension of his literary knowledge. In 1824-25 he worked at Niddrie, near Edinburgh. In 1829 he gained the friendship of Robert Carruthers, editor of the Inverness Courier, and published a volume entitled Poems written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason (1829), which was followed by Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (1835). His attention was soon drawn to the ecclesiastical controversies which were agitating Scotland, and his famous Letter to Lord Brougham on the 'Auchterarder Case,' brought him prominently into notice. In 1834-39 he acted as bank-accountant; in 1839 he was invited to Edinburgh by Dr Candlish and Robert Paul, who had read his famous letter, as editor of the Witness, a newspaper started in the interest of the Non-intrusion party in the Church of Scotland; and in 1840 he published in its columns a series of geological articles, which were afterwards collected under the title of The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field (1841). These articles were very remarkable, from both a scientific and a literary point of view. They contained a minute account of the author's discovery 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. At the meeting of the British Association in the same year (1840) he was warmly praised by Murchison, Agassiz, and Buckland. Agassiz proposed that one of the fossils should be named Pterichthys Milleri, and said that 'he would give his left hand to possess such powers of description as this man.' Miller's editorial labours during the heat of the Disruption struggle were immense, and educated the people for the climax in 1843. He used the term 'Free Church' before the Disruption. In 1847 he had to vindicate his position as editor in a private pamphlet against clerical interference, and may be said to have come off triumphant. But, after years of hard, earnest, fagging toil, his brain gave way, and, in a moment of aberration, he shot himself at Portobello, near Edinburgh, on the night of the 23d December 1856. Miller contributed several tales to the series known as Wilson's Tales of the Borders (1835), and was also a contributor to Chambers's Journal. He was not a ready writer; Chalmers said of him that when he did go off he was a great gun, but he required a deal of time to load. Yet he contributed at least a thousand articles to the Witness; Peter Bayne terms them 'complete journalistic essays, symmetrical in plan, finished in execution, and of sustained and splendid ability.' Miller's works, besides those already mentioned, are First Impressions of England and its People (1847), the record of a journey to England in 1845; Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness, in which he combatted the evolution theory (1850); My Schools and Schoolmasters, or the Story of my Education (1854); and Testimony of the Rocks (1857), an attempt to reconcile the cosmogony of Genesis with the geology of nature, by the hypothesis that the days mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis do not represent the actual duration of the successive periods of creation, but only the time occupied by God in unrolling a panoramic vision of these periods before the eyes of Moses. To the above list was afterwards added the following posthumous volumes: Cruise of the Betsey (1858), being geological investigations among the islands of Scotland; Sketch Book of Popular Geology, with preface by Mrs Miller (1859); Headship of Christ, with preface by Bayne (1861); Essays, Historical and Biographical
(1862); Tales and Sketches (1863); Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood (1863); Leading Articles, with preface by Rev. John Davidson (1870).
Miller's services to science have undoubtedly been great, but he is even more distinguished as a man than as a savant. Honest, high-minded, earnest, and hugely industrious, he was a true Scot, a hearty but not a sour Presbyterian (for he loved Burns as much as he revered Knox); and there are few of whom Scotland has better reason to be proud than 'the stone-mason of Cromarty.' Miller was married to Lydia Mackenzie Fraser in 1837. She assisted him in literary work, and possessed good taste and ability. She wrote on Cats and Dogs (1856), and her eldest daughter, Harriet Miller Davidson, wrote several serial tales. Besides his autobiography, see the Life by Peter Bayne (2 vols. 1871), and a short one by W. K. Leask (1896).