Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

  • William Keith Leask
Date:
[pref. 1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    comparison with the sagacity of Bentley or the instinct of Porson. What habits of classical verse-composition had done for these scholars is brought to the geologist by observation. This, in unison with creative mental power, will alone preserve the name of the natural scientist. The first has kept White of Selborne a literary evergreen : the second has maintained his place for Cuvier. Miller’s own friend, Dr. Longmuir, rightly singles out this Champollion-like trait of sagacity as his most characteristic feature, by which ‘he seemed by intuition to perceive what cost other minds no small amount of careful investigation.’ He was very cautious in statement, and laborious in the acquisition of his data. In his works the reader will find no second-hand statements, no airy generalisation; even in fields where special research in minute departments had been by circumstances denied to him, his gift of constructive imagination often enables him to supply such defects as later investigators may have detected and added. ‘ The more,’ says Professor Huxley, ‘ I study the fishes of the Old Red, the more I am struck by the patience and sagacity manifested in his researches, and by the natural insight which, in his case, seems to have supplied the want of special anatomical knowledge.’ And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot fail to be struck with the per- tinence of his quotations and illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful memory and
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