Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
MILLER, HUGH (b. Cromarty, Scotland, 10 October
1802; d. Portobello, Scotland, 24 December 1856),
geology.
Miller was the elder son of Hugh Miller by his
second wife, Harriet. His father, the master of a
fishing sloop, was drowned when Miller was five. At
school the boy was unruly and independent; and
instead of following the conventional education that
was open to one of his intelligence and social position,
he apprenticed himself to a stonemason at the age of
seventeen and thereafter used his leisure to educate
himself in natural history and literature. His geological
studies arose directly from his work as a mason and
from his interest in the history, scenery, and folklore
of the Highlands. Miller discovered that the Old Red
Sandstone was not (as was commonly believed)
virtually devoid of fossils but contained in certain
strata an abundant fauna of spectacular bony fish
that constituted one of the earliest vertebrate faunas
then known. His Scenes and Legends of the North of
Scotland (1835) brought him recognition as a
descriptive writer of striking power; in addition its
chapter “The Antiquary of the World,” describing
geology as “the most poetical of all the sciences,”
led to correspondence with Roderick Murchison and
thus to contact with the scientific community at large.
In 1834, after some twelve years as a journeyman
mason, Miller exchanged an outdoor life for that of
an accountant in a Cromarty bank; and in 1837 he
married Lydia Fraser, an author of children's books.
In 1839 he entered the patronage controversy in the
Church of Scotland by publishing a powerful open
letter to Lord Brougham; his abilities were immediately
recognized by the “nonintrusion” party, and
he was invited to Edinburgh to edit their newspaper,
The Witness. Miller's leading articles (from 1840)
made him at once one of the most prominent and
influential figures in public life in Scotland. His
eloquent style, passionate commitment, and independent
position were deployed with great effectiveness
in the protracted struggle for the right of Scottish
people to control the appointment of ministers in the
national church. When at the Disruption (1843) the
Free Kirk seceded on this issue, Miller used his
influence to try to prevent the new body from
retreating into a “sectarian” position and to keep
alive the ideal of a truly national but non-Erastian
church. As an integral part of this ideal, he pleaded
for public education to be undenominational and fully
grounded in modern science: he believed that this
would defend Christian faith not only against
the “infidelity” of materialism but also against
the “Puseyite” anti-intellectualism of the Oxford
Movement and the literalistic obscurantism of the
scriptural “antigeologists.”
Soon after Miller's arrival in Edinburgh, the
meeting there of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science gave him an opportunity
to meet many of the leading British scientists and
also Louis Agassiz, then the greatest authority on
fossil fish. His subsequent articles in The Witness
on his own research and its implications were
amplified into his first scientific book, The Old Red
Sandstone (1841). Like all his books this was not a
conventional scientific monograph but a series of