Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/570

 552 HUGH MILLER vian population inhabiting the shores of the I German ocean from Fife to Caithness. On his father's side he was fourth in descent in a line of sailors from John Feddes, one of the last of the buccaneers on the Spanish main, who returned to Cromarty to enjoy his money, and built "the long, low house" in which his dis- tinguished great-grandson passed his youth. On his mother's side he was of highland blood, and fifth in descent from Donald Roy of Ross- shire, famed for his piety and his second sight. His father was drowned in a tempest (a fate which had befallen several of his ancestors) in 1807; and from that time, though still living with his mother, he was chiefly under the care of two maternal uncles, who had greater influ- ence and authority over him until the age of manhood than any other persons. One was a harness maker and the other a cartwright, and he accounts them the most important of his schoolmasters. His uncle Alexander encour- aged his early bent toward natural history, and taught him much about rocks, clouds, rains, tides, trees, ferns, shell fish, sea fowl, and in- sects. His uncle James interested him in human history, and gave him his liking for traditional lore, Scottish antiquities, social habits, and in- dividual eccentricities. The tastes and predi- lections of both uncles were deeply impressed on him, and wherever he went in later life the geology and humanity of the district seemed equally to attract him. In his fifth year he was sent to a dame's school, where he learned to read. He was thence transferred to the gram- mar school of Cromarty, where he went through the ordinary course of rudimentary studies. He even began Latin with a view to college, but from distaste failed in it completely, being usually at the nether end of a very poor class, which position even he maintained only by displaying an unaccountable facility in trans- lation. The master read aloud every morning in English the task assigned for the day, and Hugh was able to remember the whole render- ing in its order, and to give it back in the even- ing word for word. Much of the leisure se- cured in this way was employed in reading translations from the classics by stealth. About his 15th year he attended for some time a sub- scription school set up as a rival to the gram- mar school. But from this whole amount of pedagogy he derived, according to his own esti- mate, only one advantage, namely, the faculty of reading books, with the correlative accom- plishment of writing. He had acquired a rep- utation among his class fellows as a narrator of stories ; and having exhausted the subjects of his reading and the various adventures that he had himself heard told, he was accustomed to extemporize with great success the wildest biographies. Meantime, other branches of his education had been going on outside of the school. He was the leader in excursions along the precipices and into the caves on the coast. He had learned to collect on the beach and to distinguish from each other the various rocks of the locality, as porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz, and mica schists, and had discovered for himself that Cromarty possessed among its minerals one precious stone, the garnet; and his observations in other departments had been encouraged and corrected by his uncle Sandy, who, as he always claimed, knew more of living nature than many professors of nat- ural history. He had studied scenery, customs, and physiognomies in the highlands of Suther- landshire, among his Gaelic cousins ; had heard the story of Culloden from men who fought in the battle; had conversed with an old lady who witnessed the last witch-burning in the north of Scotland; and had acquired a habit, which marks his life and his writings, of study- ing historical monuments as well as geological formations, collecting local legends as well as fossils, delighting as much to discover a kelpie as a pterodactyl, and regarding types of char- acter and phases of society in connection with the facts of science. The foremost youth in the district, his uncles wished him to prepare for Aberdeen college, and there to study for the church; but he demurred, declaring that he had no call to the sacred office, and they admitted that he had better be anything than an uncalled minister. A trade was therefore resolved upon, and he was apprenticed for three years to one of his relatives, who was a stone mason. From his 17th till his 34th year he led the life of an operative mason, journeying in summer to pursue his labors in different parts of Scotland, devoting all his leisure to ear- nest intellectual cultivation, reading all kinds of books on summer evenings and at home during the winter, and cherishing a belief from the beginning that literature and perhaps nat- ural science would after all prove his proper vocation. During the first part of this period (1818-'25), as an apprentice and journeyman, he was subjected to all the coarse and rough experiences of his trade, working as one of a gang in quarries or in sheds, and passing his evenings in wretched highland bothies or in hovels in lowland villages. He afterward ex- changed the life of a journeyman, working sea- son after season for different masters, for that of a jobbing mason, undertaking private com- missions in the way of his trade, such as the sculpturing and lettering of tombstones, stone dials, and the like ; yet his habits of work con- tinued in all respects to be those of a common mason, and his domestic accommodations those of any frugal Scotch mechanic. During this laborious period of his life he formed an inti- mate and extensive acquaintance with the best English and Scotch literature, embracing not only the departments of fiction, history, and poetry, but the philosophical works of Locke, Kames, Hume, Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart. He seized upon every work of natu- ral science that fell in his way, and moreover wrote a great variety of verses, rhapsodies, and reflections. His various scenes of labor made him familiar with the scenery, antiquities, and