Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/71

Rh the necessity of any editorial comments on the style and manner of the volume in question, yet leaves untouched the more pleasing task of investigating its contents.

It should perhaps be stated that about one third of the work consists of a series of sketches, written for, and originally published in, 'The Witness' newspaper; these sketches have expanded into a volume of 300 pages, and the reading public has abundant cause to be gratified with the expansion. Mr. Miller commences his task with some advice to working men, showing them what is their true policy, and recommending them to abstain from chartist meetings, and make a right use of their eyes:—"the commonest things are worth looking at—even stones, and weeds, and the most familiar animals": he then relates how, when "a slim loose-jointed boy," he set out a little before sunrise, to make his first acquaintance with a life of labour in one of its most disagreeable forms—to work in a quarry. In this occupation his interest was greatly excited by the appearance of a platform of rock laid bare by the power of gunpowder: "the entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before." He "could trace every bend and curvature, every cross hollow and counter-ridge of the corresponding phenomena; for the resemblance was no half resemblance, it was the thing itself." Fresh causes of wonder and admiration continued to break on the mind of the young quarry-man, until he found that the life of labour was not without its sweets: but when, a few days afterwards, he was removed to another quarry, "in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhang the north shore of the Moray Frith," when in the course of the first day's employment he picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of his hammer, the blow revealing to his delighted and astonished eye "a beautifully finished piece of sculpture—one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital," — then he became a geologist, his fate was sealed, the foundation of his fame was laid, for with that discovery there seemed to rise within him a desire for knowledge only to be increased as knowledge was attained.

Time passed on, and Mr. Miller became a scientific geologist; we soon find him emerging from the infantile wonderer at a beautiful fossil, and writing, in the learned phraseology of a professor, of "an enormous deposit of dark-coloured bituminous schist, slightly micaceous, calcareous, or semi-calcareous—here and there interlaced with veins of carbonate of lime—here and there compact and highly siliceous, &c."—writing, in fact, like the veriest sages of the science: but let us turn from scientific disquisitions on strata to the more interesting no-