4. Observations on Binocular Vision. By Prof. William 5. Essai sur les Phosphènes, ou Anneaux Lumineux de la Rétine, considérés dans leurs rapports avec la Phy- siologie et la Pathologie de la Vision. Par le Dr. 6. Recherches sur la Vision Binoculaire, Simple et Double, et sur les Conditions Physiologiques du Relief. Par le Dr. Serre, d'Uzès. Bruxelles: 1856. 7. On the Phenomena and Mechanism of the Focal Ad- justment of the Eye to distinct Vision at different Distances. By Professor Allen Thomson, M.D., 8. On the Phenomena of Relief in the Image formed on the Ground Glass of the Camera Obscura. Claudet, F.R.S. From the Proceedings of the Royal 9. On the Stereomonoscope: a new Instrument by which an apparently single Picture produces the Stereo- scopic Illusion. By A. Claudet, F.R.S. From the Proceedings of the Royal Society: April 15. 1858, 437 VI. The Earls of Kildare and their Ancestors, from 1057 VII. Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, D.C.L., M.P. for the IX. 1. The London Cotton Plant; a Journal of Tropical Civilisation. Published for the Proprietors by C. 2. Report of the Special Committee on the Revival of the African Slave-trade, made to the Southern Conven- tion at Montgomery, Alabama, May 10th, 1858. 3. Resolutions passed at a Public Meeting of Free Co- loured Men, held at New Bedford, Massachusetts, on THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, JULY, 1858. No. CCXIX. ART. I.1. The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides, with Rambles of a Geologist. By HUGH MILLER. Edinburgh: 1858. 2. The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field. By HUGH MILLER. Ninth Edition, 1858. 3. First Impressions of England and its People. By HUGH MILLER. Sixth Edition, 1857. 4. Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness. By HUGH MILLER. London: 1849. 5. My Schools and Schoolmasters, or the Story of my Education. By HUGH MILLER. Edinburgh: 1854. 6. The Testimony of the Rocks, or Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. By HUGH MILLER. Edinburgh: 1857. No common interest attaches to the life and labours of the remarkable man whose writings we have placed at the head of this article. Those writings have attained a very high place in the literature of his own time, and there are good grounds for believing that this place will be permanent in the literature of the English language. They belong to the History of Science, and mark an important epoch in the progress of discovery. This, no doubt, is true more or less of many works which are afterwards forgotten, and of many contributions to our knowledge which fall into the general inheritance with but little recollection of the quarter from which they came. But there are many guarantees against such being the fate of the works of VOL. CVIII, NO. CCXIX. B - Hugh Miller. The interest of his narrative, the purity of his style, his inexhaustible faculty of happy and ingenious illustration, his high imaginative power-so essential to the completeness of high intellectual faculties, and that light of genius which it is so difficult to define, yet so impossible to mistake, all promise to secure for the author of the Old Red Sandstone 'the lasting admiration of his countrymen. Those who in after times desire to make themselves acquainted with the subject on which Hugh Miller specially employed his pen, are little likely to seek their information in any other form than that in which it was originally conveyed. a Hugh Miller was born in the little town of Cromarty, on the north-eastern shores of Scotland, in the second year of the present century. His father, the owner and master of vessels employed in the coasting trade, perished at sea in 1807; and his mother was left dependent in a great measure for her own support and the education of her family upon the generosity of her kindred. Her two brothers, one of whom was a carpenter and the other a harness maker, were her principal support. To the manly and simple virtues of these two uncles Hugh Miller has left, in one of the most delightful of his works, a grateful and enduring tribute. Hugh, having learned his letters and his spelling under the tuition of a worthy woman, whose establishment was of the humblest kind, passed in due course to the parish school. There he seems to have been no otherwise distinguished than as a harum-scarum boy - with a turn for any literature but that which belonged to school,reader of strange books—a teller of queer stories — a leader in expeditions among the caves and precipices of the neighbouring coast. But in the learning which all scholars of his class in Scotland look to as the principal object of ambition, viz., that which may fit them for the ministry of the Church, Miller, much to the disappointment of his uncles, made no progress whatever. Accordingly when the years of boyhood had been spent, and the necessity of self-support came upon him, he had no other resource than some manual occupation. One of his cousins was a mason; and he had observed that this employment left him, during a considerable portion of the year, long intervals of leisure. This, therefore, was the handicraft which he chose, and at seventeen years of age he began work as an apprentice. During the three years of the term of service he seems to have been exclusively employed in his native county, and chiefly in his native district. From the narrative he has left us of this portion of his life it would appear that his acquaintance with men and manners had never even extended so far as the neighbouring town of Inverness. His working seasons were spent wherever his master could get a job-sometimes in building farm-houses, farm-steadings or lodges at the neighbouring country houses- sometimes in the coarser operations of opening quarries and building dykes. About a year after his apprenticeship had expired, work became scarce in the North, and the great building speculations of 1824-25 having begun, Miller was induced to try whether 'he could not make his way as a mechanic among the stone'cutters of Edinburgh- perhaps the most skilful in their pro'fession in the world." Probably no man who was himself destined to add to the literary celebrity of Scotland had ever so singular an introduction to the society of its capital. That society then numbered amongst its members such men as Dugald Stewart, and Jeffrey, and Wilson, and the Ettrick Shepherd, and Sir Walter Scott. But none of these men had the Cromarty mason an opportunity of seeing,—even in the street. During the ten months of his residence Miller spent his time in stone-cutting for the Mansion House of Niddry—a place lying in the hollow that intervenes between Arthur's Seat and the heights which are crowned by the ruins of Craigmillar. He worked with a squad of wild, dissipated masons, associated with those rudest of the labouring classes-there peculiarly rude-who find employment around the outskirts of our large towns. He was lodged in the same room with a farm-servant and his wife, of whom he tells us that the man in his journey through life had picked up scarce 'an idea;' and that the woman, though what in Scotland is 'called a "fine body," was not more intellectual than her hus'band.' Returning to his native town with impaired health, Miller spent some of the following years in the lighter work of his profession, such as the preparation of tombstones in the country churchyards of Cromarty and Ross. The support which habits of temperance and frugality enabled him to derive from these sources of employment failing him in 1828, he repaired to Inverness. There he made his first not very promising attempt to enter on the field of literature. He sent to the 'Inverness Courier' some verses of very moderate merit, which were, not unnaturally, rejected. Piqued by this result, he determined on publishing them with others in a separate form, and having employed for his purposes the printer of the Courier,' he became personally known to the editor, a gentleman of the name of Carruthers, to whom the high merit belongs of having early discovered the abilities and encouraged the exertions of his humbler countryman. anonymously as the productions of a journeyman mason.' This title implies an apology, which in some respects was not needed, and in others was perhaps not sufficient. Miller's verses testified to knowledge and accomplishments for the want of which his position in life would have accounted, and they were chiefly deficient in those qualities which may be and often are most independent of education and of culture. The truth is that poetry cannot be judged by any standard lower than her own. Her brightest flowers have sprung, at times, from uncultivated ground; and the country which has listened to such immortal song from her Ayrshire ploughman' cannot be called upon to accept at more than their intrinsic worth the offerings of a journeyman mason.' Yet Miller's failure to rise to any degree of superiority in this department of literature is another among the many proofs how subtle are the elements on which the gift of true poetry depends. We shall see how vivid his powers of imagination were, how great his command. of language, and how fine his ear for its harmony in prose. He soon began to discover the direction in which he might attain success. Miller's verses were published During the next few years in which he continued to work as a mason in his native town, the friendly editor afforded him an opportunity for occasional contributions on subjects of local interest; and these, together with his poems, soon brought him a certain celebrity in the North. They brought him, however, little else; and as about this time he had become engaged in marriage, and as the scanty earnings of his labour afforded him no very bright prospects of supporting a wife and family, he seems to have seriously contemplated emigration to America. Fortunately a new and very unexpected employment was proffered to him. It was proposed to establish in Cromarty a branch agency of one of the great banking companies which play so considerable a part in the social economy of Scotland. Connected with this agency Miller was nominated to the office of accountant, for which it was necessary that he should prepare himself by some preliminary instruction. For this purpose he repaired to the Low Country in 1834; and in the course of a few months returned to Cromarty, not only thoroughly master of the more mechanical duties of his office, but with such a knowledge of the principles of banking that he afterwards took an able and active part in the discussion of that difficult and complicated subject. It was at this time that he published, under the advice of the late Sir T. D. Lauder, his volume on Scenes and Legends 6 |