Miller, Hugh

Hugh (1802-1856), a Scottish geologist. He was born at Cromarty on the northeastern coast of Scotland. His father, a sailor, perished at sea when Hugh was five years old. Hugh learned much from his widowed mother and from two uncles, one a saddler, the other a carpenter. He received the typical Scottish inheritance of piety, integrity, and industry. As a child he was fond of the hills, the sky, and the heather bell. He enjoyed reading and was fond of writing, but did not like to attend school. At fifteen, he chose to be a stonemason, reasoning that it would give him leisure in the winter season for books and writing. Looking back upon this period of his life, he exclaimed, "Noble, upright, self-reliant toil, who that knows thy solid worth and value would be ashamed of thy hard hands, and thy soiled vestments, and thy obscure tasks,--thy humble cottage, and hard couch, and homely fare!"

In later years he wrote an autobiography called My Schools and Schoolmasters. It is an excellent book for boys. It treats of companions and toil, of tramps and travels in search of work, of reading and of writing, but not of schools in the ordinary sense of the word. He read Locke and Hume, Goldsmith and Addison. He wrote poems for the Inverness Courier and for the Edinburgh Scotsman, but, as they were not accepted by the editors, he imitated Burns by bringing out a little book entitled Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason. Its reception convinced him that he was not born to be a poet, although the peasantry who had known him as a child now looked upon him as a genius. A volume of prose, Scenes and Legends of Cromarty, fared somewhat better. In 1834 he married a woman of superior social advantages and dropped the mason's mallet and chisel for the implements of a clerk in a bank.

When the great contest over the appointment of pastors came on in the Scottish church, Miller was one of the seceders. The leaders in the movement, who had detected his ability with a pen, placed him in editorial charge of the Witness, a paper published twice a week in Edinburgh in advocacy of the Free Kirk movement. This position he continued to occupy until the 24th of December, 1856. He became insane and died by a pistol shot fired by his own hand.

Ere he left Cromarty Miller had become interested in geology. He studied the cliffs of that vicinity and puzzled over the fossil remains found in the sandstone. He corresponded with Lyell, Murchison, and Agassiz. About 1840 he began to contribute a series of articles to the Witness entitled The Old Red Sandstone. These were afterward published in book form. They were regarded as a remarkable contribution to geology and won for him a reputation as an original thinker and a geologist. In defense of the Biblical account of the creation, he also wrote The Footsteps of the Creator and The Testimony of the Rocks. With regard to the origin of species he stood by what he conceived to be the Biblical idea of special creation. He observed and communicated many facts of use to the evolutionist, but he stoutly opposed Darwin to the last. As a scientific thinker he is allied to Agassiz rather than to Darwin and Huxley. Some have thought that his reason was unsettled by an attempt to reconcile the facts of geology with the Biblical account of the creation in six days. He had been brought up to believe the Scriptures word for word, exactly as they are written. He interpreted the day of Genesis as a day of twenty-four hours rather than as a geological age.