Part 2

Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty, of humble but respectable parents, whose history would have possessed no inconsiderable interest, even if it had not derived one of a higher kind from the genius and fortunes of their child. By the paternal side he was descended from a race of sea-faring people, whose family burying-ground, if we judge from the past, seems to be the sea. Under its green waves his father sleeps: his grandfather, his two granduncles, one of whom sailed round the world with Anson, lie also there; and the same extensive cemetery contains the relics of several of his more distant relatives. His father was but an infant of scarcely a year old, at the death of our author’s grandfather, and had to commence life as a poor ship-boy; but such was the energy of his mind, that, when little turned of thirty, he had become the master and owner of a fine large sloop, and had built himself a good house, which entitled his son to the franchise on the passing of the Reform Bill. Having unfortunately lost his sloop in a storm, he had to begin the world anew, and he soon became master and owner of another, and would have thriven, had he lived; but the hereditary fate was too strong for him, and when our author was a little boy of five summers, his father’s fine new sloop foundered at sea in a terrible tempest, and he and his crew were never more heard of. Mr. Miller had two sisters younger than himself, both of whom died ere they attained to womanhood. His mother experienced the usual difficulties which a widow has to encounter in the decent education of her family; but she struggled honestly and successfully, and ultimately found her reward in the character and fame of her son. It is from this excellent woman that Mr. Miller has inherited those sentiments and feelings which have given energy to his talents as the defender of revealed truth, and the champion of the Church of his fathers. She was the great granddaughter of a venerable man, still well known to tradition in the north of Scotland as Donald Roy of Nigg,—a sort of northern Peden, who is described in the history of our Church as the single individual who, at the age of eighty, when the presbytery of the district had assembled in the empty church for the purpose of inducting an obnoxious presentee, had the courage to protest against the intrusion, and to declare “that the blood of the people of Nigg would be required at their hands, if they settled a man _to the walls_ of that church.” Tradition has represented him as a seer of visions, and a prophesier of prophecies; but whatever credit may be given to stories of this kind, which have been told also of Knox, Welsh, and Rutherford, this ancient champion of Non-Intrusion was a man of genuine piety, and the savor of his ennobling beliefs and his strict morals has survived in his family for generations. If the child of such parents did not receive the best education which his native town could afford, it was not their fault, nor that of his teacher. The fetters of a gymnasium are not easily worn by the adventurous youth who has sought and found his pleasures among the hills and on the waters. They chafe the young and active limb that has grown vigorous under the blue sky, and never known repose but at midnight. The young philosopher of Cromarty was a member of this restless community; and he had been the hero of adventures and accidents among rocks and woods, which are still remembered in his native town. The parish school was therefore not the scene of his enjoyments; and while he was a truant, and, with reverence be it spoken, a dunce, while under its jurisdiction, he was busy in the fields and on the sea-shore in collecting those stores of knowledge which he was born to dispense among his fellow-men. He escaped, however, from school, with the knowledge of reading, writing, and a little arithmetic, and with the credit of uniting a great memory with a little scholarship. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, Cuvier, he had studied Natural History in the fields and among the mountains ere he had sought for it in books; while the French philosopher had become a learned naturalist before he had even looked upon the world of Nature. This singular contrast is not difficult to explain. With a sickly constitution and a delicate frame, the youthful Cuvier wanted that physical activity which the observation of Nature demands. Our Scottish geologist, on the contrary, in vigorous health, and with an iron frame, rushed to the rocks and the sea-shore in search of the instruction which was not provided for him at school, and which he could find no books to supply.

After receiving this measure of education, Mr. Miller set out in February, 1821, with a heavy heart, as he himself confesses, “to make his first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint:”—

“I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his ‘Twa Dogs’ as one of the most disagreeable of all employments—to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods,—a reader of curious books, when I could get them,—a gleaner of old traditionary stories,—and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith, rather, (the Bay of Cromarty,) with a little, clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, and which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, p. 4.

After removing the loose fragments below, picks and wedges and levers were applied in vain by our author and his brother workmen to tear up and remove the huge strata beneath. Blasting by gunpowder became necessary. A mass of the diluvial clay came tumbling down, “bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter.” While admiring the pretty cock goldfinch, and the light-blue and grayish-yellow woodpecker, and moralizing on their fate, the workmen were ordered to lay aside their tools, and thus ended the first day’s labor of our young geologist. The sun was then sinking behind the thick fir wood behind him, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching to the shore. Notwithstanding his blistered hands, and the fatigue which blistered them, he found himself next morning as light of heart as his fellow-laborers, and able to enjoy the magnificent scenery around him, which he thus so beautifully describes:—

“There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky; and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight on the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards; and then, as reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, pp. 6, 7.

In raising from its bed the large mass of strata which the gunpowder had loosened, on the surface of the solid stone, our young quarrier descried the ridged and furrowed ripple marks which the tide leaves upon every sandy shore, and he wondered what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, and of what element they had been composed. His admiration was equally excited by a circular depression in the sandstone, “broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening.” And before the day closed, a series of large stones had rolled down from the clay, “all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed in the sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of years.” Was the clay which enclosed them created on the rock upon which it lay? No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article!—were the ejaculations of the geologist at his alphabet.

Our author and his companions were soon removed to an easier wrought quarry, and one more pregnant with interest, which had been opened “in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith.” Here the geology of the district exhibited itself in section.

“We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz,—its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in another, with its bed of sandstone and shale,—its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Red Sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,—basalts, ironstones, hypersthenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentences were the patient gatherings of years.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, pp. 9, 10.

In this rich field of inquiry, our author encountered, almost daily, new objects of wonder and instruction. In one nodular mass of limestone he found the beautiful ammonite, like one of the finely sculptured volutes of an Ionic capital. Within others, fish-scales and bivalve shells; and in the centre of another he detected a piece of decayed wood. Upon quitting the quarry for the building upon which the workmen were to be employed, the workmen received half a holiday, and our young philosopher devoted this valuable interval to search for certain curiously shaped stones, which one of the quarriers told him resembled the heads of boarding-pikes, and which, under the name of _thunder-bolts_, were held to be a sovereign remedy for cattle that had been bewitched. On the shore two miles off, where he expected these remarkable bodies, he found deposits quite different either from the sandstone cliffs or the primary rocks further to the west. They consisted of “thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance,” which burned with a bright flame and a bituminous odor. Though only the eighth part of an inch thick, each layer contained thousands of fossils peculiar to the lias,—scallops and gryphites, ammonites, twigs and leaves of plants, cones of pine, pieces of charcoal, and scales of fishes,—the impressions being of a chalky whiteness, contrasting strikingly with their black bituminous lair. Among these fragments of animal and vegetable life, he at last detected his _thunder-bolt_ in the form of a Belemnite, the remains of a kind of cuttle-fish long since extinct.

In the exercise of his profession, which “was a wandering one,” our author advanced steadily, though slowly and surely, in his geological acquirements.

“I remember,” says he, “passing direct on one occasion from the wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing quartz rock of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian, the mountain limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach on the Moray Frith. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granites and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north, I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the Oolite; in the south, I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reeds and tree ferns of the carboniferous period.... In the north, there occurs a vast gap in the scale. The Lias leans unconformably against the Old Red Sandstone; there is no mountain limestone, no coal measures, none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones. There are at least three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the scale is well-nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from the Lower to the Upper Lias, in another from the Inferior to the Great Oolite, and onward to the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag. We may explore in a third locality beds identical in their organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. In a fourth, we find the flints and fossils of the chalk. The lower part of the scale is also well-nigh complete. The Old Red Sandstone is amply developed in Moray, Caithness, and Ross, and the Grauwacke very extensively in Banffshire. But to acquaint one’s self with the three missing formations,—to complete one’s knowledge of the entire scale, by filling up the hiatus,—it is necessary to remove to the south. The geology of the Lothians is the geology of at least two thirds of the gap, and perhaps a little more;—the geology of Arran wants only a few of the upper beds of the New Red Sandstone to fill it entirely.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, pp. 13-17.

After having spent nearly fifteen years in the profession of a stone-mason, Mr. Miller was promoted to a position more suited to his genius. When a bank was established in his native town of Cromarty, he received the appointment of accountant, and he was thus employed, for five years, in keeping ledgers and discounting bills. When the contest in the Church of Scotland had come to a close, by the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterurder Case, Mr. Miller’s celebrated letter to Lord Brougham attracted the particular attention of the party which was about to leave the Establishment, and he was selected as the most competent person to conduct the _Witness_ newspaper, the principal metropolitan organ of the Free Church. The great success which this journal has met with is owing, doubtless, to the fine articles, political, ecclesiastical, and geological, which Mr. Miller has written for it. In the few leisure hours which so engrossing an occupation has allowed him to enjoy, he has devoted himself to the ardent prosecution of scientific inquiries; and we trust the time is not far distant when the liberality of his country, to which he has done so much honor, will allow him to give his whole time to the prosecution of science.

Geologists of high character had believed that the Old Red Sandstone was defective in organic remains; and it was not till after ten years’ acquaintance with it that Mr. Miller discovered it to be _richly fossiliferous_. The labors of other ten years were required to assign to its fossils their exact place in the scale.

Among the fossils discovered by our author, the _Pterichthys_ or winged fish is doubtless the most remarkable. He had disinterred it so early as 1831, but it was only in 1838 that he “introduced it to the acquaintance of geologists.” It was not till 1831 that Mr. Miller began to receive assistance in his studies from without. In the appendix to Messrs. Anderson of Inverness’s admirable _Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland_, which “he perused with intense interest,” he found the most important information respecting the geology of the North of Scotland; and during a correspondence with the accomplished authors of that work, many of his views were developed, and his difficulties removed. In 1838, he communicated to Dr. Malcolmson of Madras, then in Paris, a drawing and description of the _Pterichthys_. His letter was submitted to Agassiz, and subsequently a restored drawing was communicated to the Elgin Scientific Society. The great naturalist, as well as the members of the provincial society, were surprised at the new form of life which Mr. Miller had disclosed, and some of them, no doubt, regarded it with a sceptical eye. “Not many months after, however, a true _bona fide Pterichthys_ was turned up in one of the newly-discovered beds of Nairnshire.” In his last visit to Scotland, Agassiz found six species of the _Pterichthys_, three of which, and the wings of a fourth, were in Mr. Miller’s collection.

This remarkable animal has less resemblance than any other fossil of the Old Red Sandstone to anything that now exists. When first brought to view by the single blow of a hammer, there appeared on a ground of light-colored limestone the effigy of a creature, fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful looking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray, (or skate,) and a long angular tail, equal in length to a third of the entire figure. Its general resemblance is to the letter T,—the upper part of the vertical line being swelled out, and the lower part ending in an angular point, the two horizontal portions being, in the opinion of Agassiz, organs of locomotion. To this remarkable fossil M. Agassiz has given the appropriate name of _Pterichthys Milleri_. An account of it, accompanied with two fine specimens, was communicated to the Geological Section of the British Association at Glasgow, in September, 1840; and the most ample details, with accurate drawings, were afterwards published, in 1841, in Mr. Miller’s first work, _The Old Red Sandstone_, which was dedicated to Sir Roderick Murchison, who was born on the Old Red Sandstone of the North, in the same district as Mr. Miller, and whose great acquirements and distinguished labors are known all over the world among scientific men. This admirable work has already passed through three editions. From the originality and accuracy of its descriptions, and the importance of the researches which it contains, it has obtained for its author a high reputation among geologists; while from the elegance and purity of its style, and the force and liveliness of its illustrations, it has received the highest praise from its more general readers.[1]

Although we have been obliged, from the information which it contains of our author’s early studies, to mention the “Old Red Sandstone” as if it had been his first work; yet so early as 1830, after he had made his first fossil discoveries at Cromarty, he composed a paper on the subject, (his first published production,) which appeared as one of the chapters of a small legendary and descriptive work, entitled _The Traditional History of Cromarty_, which did not appear till 1835. This chapter, entitled “The Antiquary of the World,” possesses a high degree of interest. After describing the scene around him in its pictorial aspect, and under the warm associations, which link it with existing life, he surveys it with the cool eye of an “antiquary of the world,” studying its once buried monuments, and decyphering the alphabet of plants and animals, the hieroglyphics which embosom the history of past times and of successive creations. The gigantic Ben Wevis, with its attendant hills, rose abruptly to the west. The distant peaks of Ben Vaichard appeared in the south, and far to the north were descried the lofty hills of Sutherland, and even the Ord-hill of Caithness. Descending from the towers of nature’s lofty edifice he surveys its ruins, its broken sculptures, and its half-defaced inscriptions, as exhibited in certain Ichthyic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone which had then no name, and which were unknown to the most accomplished geologists. Among these he specially notices “a confused bituminous-looking mass that had much the appearance of a toad or frog,” thus shadowing forth in the morning twilight the curious _Pterichthys_, which he was able afterwards, in better specimens, to exhibit in open day. As we have already referred, with some minuteness, to the fossils which our author had at this time discovered in the great charnel-house of the old world, we shall indulge our readers with a specimen of the noble sentiments which they inspired, and of the beautiful language in which these sentiments are clothed.