Miller, Hugh, 1802-1856

Hugh Miller (born 10 October 1802, Cromarty, Scotland – died 24 December 1856, Portibello, Edinburgh, Scotland) was a self-taught Scottish geologist and writer, folklorist and an evangelical Christian.

Miller was born in Cromarty, the first of three children of Harriet Wright (bap. 1780, d. 1863) and Hugh Miller (bap. 1754, d. 1807), a shipmaster in the coasting trade. Both parents were from trading and artisan families in Cromarty. His father died in a shipwreck in 1807, and he was brought up by his mother and uncles. He was educated in a parish school where he reportedly showed a love of reading. It was at this school that Miller was involved in an altercation with a classmate in which he stabbed his peer's thigh. Miller was subsequently expelled from the school following an unrelated incident. At 17 he was apprenticed to a stonemason, and his work in quarries, together with walks along the local shoreline, led him to the study of geology. In 1829 he published a volume of poems, and soon afterwards became involved in political and religious controversies, first connected to the Reform Bill, and then with the division in the Church of Scotland which led to the Disruption of 1843.

In 1834 he became accountant in one of the local banks, and in the next year brought out his Scenes and Legends in the North of Scotland. In 1837 he married the children's author Lydia Mackenzie Falconer Fraser. In 1840 the popular party in the Church, with which he had been associated, started a newspaper, the Witness, and Miller was called to be editor in Edinburgh, a position which he retained until the end of his life. He was an influential writer and speaker in the early Free Church. From 1846 he was joined at "The Witness" by Rev James Aitken Wylie.

Among his geological works are The Old Red Sandstone (1841), Footprints of the Creator (1850), The Testimony of the Rocks (1857), Sketch-book of Popular Geology. Of these books, perhaps The Old Red Sandstone was the best known. The Old Red Sandstone is still a term used to collectively describe sedimentary rocks deposited as a result of the Caledonian orogeny in the late Silurian, Devonian and earliest part of the Carboniferous period.

Miller held that the Earth was of great age, and that it had been inhabited by many species which had come into being and gone extinct, and that these species were homologous; although he believed the succession of species showed progress over time, he did not believe that later species were descended from earlier ones. He denied the Epicurean theory that new species occasionally budded from the soil, and the Lamarckian theory of development of species, as lacking evidence. He argued that all this showed the direct action of a benevolent Creator, as attested in the Bible – the similarities of species are manifestations of types in the Divine Mind; he accepted the view of Thomas Chalmers that Genesis begins with an account of geological periods, and does not mean that each of them is a day; Noah's Flood was a limited subsidence of the Middle East. Geology, to Miller, offered a better version of the argument from design than William Paley could provide, and answered the objections of sceptics, by showing that living species did not arise by chance or by impersonal law.

For most of 1856, Miller had severe headaches and mental distress, and the most probable diagnosis is of psychotic depression. Victorian medicine did not help. He feared that he might harm his wife or children because of persecutory delusions. Miller died by suicide, shooting himself in the chest with a revolver in his house, Shrub Mount, Portobello, on the night of 23/24 December 1856. That night he had finished checking printers' proofs for his book on geology and Christianity, The Testimony of the Rocks. Before his death, he wrote a poem called Strange but True. He died on 24 December 1856. His funeral procession, attended by thousands, was amongst the largest in the memory of Edinburgh residents.

Miller's grave is in the Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh. His is a simple red granite monument on the north boundary wall, close to the northwest corner.