Hugh, a popular miscellaneous writer and geologist, was born in Cromarty on the 10th of October 1802. He may be said emphatically to have sprung from the bosom of the people, and to have inherited, along with his higher intellectual qualities, the virtues, habits, and feelings of the old middle-class country population of Scotland. His father was a seaman, owner of a small coasting vessel that plied along the shores of the Moray Firth, and who unfortunately perished at sea when his son was only about five years of age. But Hugh had kindly, sagacious relatives, who attended to his education, and would have struggled hard to send him to college had he not himself resolved on being a stone mason. He was proud to appear as a working man; proud of his rough coat and leather apron; and resolved to force his way upwards by solitary study, self-denial, and perseverance. As a boy he was somewhat intractable—lonely, observant, fond of books, and delighting in rambles by the sea-side, exploring the rocks, caves, and woods of his native shore. He wrought fifteen years as a mason; and his early labours in a quarry gave him his first lessons in geology. Those studies in the open air he has beautifully described—"Sweet are the uses of adversity;" and along with his love of natural science he had the feeling and fancy of a poet. His first publication was Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason, which appeared in 1829; and the same year he wrote a series of Letters on the Herring Fishing. These were recognised as remarkable productions. Their author had evidently read and studied the best English authors, and possessed extraordinary powers of description and illustration. His prose style was succinct, clear, and elegant—formed on the model of our best essayists, Cowley, Addison, and Goldsmith. His verses were less essentially poetical than his prose; and it was soon obvious to himself, as to others, that poetry was not to be his peculiar vocation. For two or three years after his advent as an author Mr Miller continued to labour as a mason; but a branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland being opened in his native town, he was appointed accountant of the new establishment. About the same time he published Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, or the Traditional History of Cromarty,—the result of many years' oral collections among the old inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood, and of a wide and curious range of reading and reflection. His next appearance was as a polemical controversialist. The Scottish Church question as to the rights of patronage then agitated the country, and Miller wrote two able pamphlets,—a Letter to Lord Brougham, and Whiggism of the Old School, supporting the principles and opinions afterwards embodied in vigorous action in the Free Church. These popular little treatises led to Mr Miller's appointment as editor of The Witness, a twice-a-week newspaper established in Edinburgh in 1840, of which he afterwards became the principal proprietor. He was now fairly launched into the world of politics and literature—a stout Presbyterian, determined to give no quarter to the opponents of spiritual independence or to the supporters of the Established Church, which he conceived to be degraded, dismantled, and obsolete. There was much bitterness and personality in this contest, but Miller gradually emerged from it, and sought distinction in a wider field. In the sixteen years of his Edinburgh life he wrote those works which now constitute his fame:—The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field; First Impressions of England and its People; Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness; and My Schools and Schoolmasters, or the Story of my Education (the last a delightful and instructive autobiography). No geologist had ever before evinced the same art or talent in popularizing the truths of his science—in investing it with poetical beauty and interest, and at the same time extending its facts and principles by close and accurate research. In the formation known as the Old Red Sandstone he is entitled to the honours of a discoverer, having shown that it is not, as was supposed, barren of fossils, but in reality rich in organic remains. In the Palaeontological history of plants and animals, and in tracing the fossil floras of Scotland, Mr Miller also did good service to science; while he laboured with uniting zeal and Christian devotedness to disprove the development hypothesis and to harmonize the phenomena of geology with the text of Scripture. His latest efforts were directed to the illustration of the first chapter of Genesis, to prove that the days of creation were not natural but prophetic days—unmeasured eras of time.

Passages of great eloquence and of rich and solemn imagination abound in these semi-theological disquisitions. The fossil remains seem, in his glowing pages, to live and flourish, to fly, swim, or gambol, or to shoot up in vegetative profusion and splendour, as in the primal dawn of creation. Such power belongs only to high genius—the power to reanimate and vivify the past, and to clothe the scattered hints and discoveries of science with living beauty and radiance. What Burns did for the old songs of Scotland, Miller did for the facts of geology. His friends, however, saw with regret that the indefatigable and inspired student was overtaxing his brain and hand. For some years before his death he suffered from ill-health and hypochondria. Always averse to general society (for he never conquered his natural shyness and awkwardness of address), his love of solitude became a disease. He had not attained by practice to facility in composition; and latterly he complained that with double labour he could only do half work; extraordinary visions or delusions overmastered at times his clear intellect; his egotism (always his greatest weakness) magnified everything affecting his fame or his writings, and he surrounded himself with weapons of defence, sword, dagger, and pistols, to guard his person and geological museum. Manifestations of this kind had been long conspicuous; yet when he took up his pen and elaborated his original conceptions and fine descriptions, no trace of mental disease was apparent. His last work, The Testimony of the Rocks, is one of the ablest and most argumentative of his compositions. He had laboured night and day at this final "testimony," and corrected its last page the day preceding his death. The excessive application, and perhaps a feeling of triumphant exultation at the successful completion of his task, overturned his already shattered intellect, and he died by his own hand on the night of the 23rd or morning of the 24th of December 1856. This melancholy termination to the life of so noble a worker produced a sensation of grief and astonishment over the whole kingdom. His indomitable energy and masculine intellect, his enthusiasm and nationality, his fine English style and brilliant imagination, the purity of his life and his devotion to Christian duty and principle—all these were well-known traits of his character and writings that hallowed and endeared his name. Scotland had lost one of her worthiest sons, and geology one of its most eloquent expounders and illustrators.

Johann Martin, was born in 1750, at Ulm, where his father was a preacher and professor. He studied for the church at Göttingen; where he became one of the Hainbund, or society of poets, which included among its members Boie, Bürger, Hötyl, and others. In 1783 Miller was appointed preacher in the cathedral of Ulm; and in 1810 he was made dean of Ulm. He wrote poetry, chiefly lyrical and elegiac; and many of his pieces have become extremely popular. He also wrote several novels and romances, in the sentimental style, of which the principal is Siegwart, a work which excited great interest, and met with much success. His novels and romances are now forgotten, and little read; but his poems have lost none of their popularity. He died in 1814.