320 M I L M I L the best ichthyologists unanimously insisted on its being dorsal, affords one of the nicest illustrations to be found of an obser vational faculty which reasons as wells as sees. He was also, in his principal geological books, TJie Footsteps of the Creator and The Testimony of the Rocks, a polemical defender of theism and of revelation against some whom he regarded as their deadly assailants. It would have been safe and pleasant for Miller to wa ive all consideration of the religious question. He would thus have escaped the dreaded sneer of the scientific expert. He would have escaped, also, the cold suspicion of many on his own side ; for the great mass of mediocre religionists like nothing so well as the simple ignoring of difficulties and hushing up of objections. But he shrank instinctively from the moral cowardice of reserve. The advance of science has tended to compromise some of his controversial positions. When he occupied the chair of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh in 1852, he could look the most eminent repre sentatives of contemporary geology in the face, and claim their assent to the possibility of drawing definite lines of demarcation between the Tertiary, Secondary, and Palaeozoic strata. He could speak of "the entire type of organic being" as altering between these periods. "All on the one side of the gap," he could dare to affirm, "belongs to one fashion, and all on the other to another and wholly different fashion." In the thirty intervening years every form of the cataclysmal scheme of geological progression has been discredited. It has become impossible to obtain anything like a consensus of opinion among scientific men as to the placing of those frontier lines between period and period which, however wide may be the margins of gradation assigned to "morning" and "evening," are indispensable to the maintenance of Miller s theory of the six-days vision of creation. "Geographical provinces and zones," says Professor Huxley, "may have been as distinctly marked in the Palseozoic epoch as at present, and those seemingly sudden appearances of new genera and species which we ascribe to new creation may be simple results of migration." Such is now the received opinion of geologists, and we may be sure that Miller, who never shut his eyes to an established fact, would have accepted it. He has said in so many words that the Bible does not teach science. In the long and memorable debate on the origin of species he strenuously engaged, maintaining, against the author of the Vestiges, the doctrine of specific creation. But when he did so he could feel that Buckland, Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lyell were on his side ; nor is it a paradox to allege that he was an ally of Darwin himself. If the author of the Vestiges was right, Darwin was wrong. In point of fact, the former was very nearly right ; but, precisely because Darwin supplies what is lacking in his argument, those who intelligently assent to the Origin of S^iccies are bound not to assent to the Vestiges. But it is chiefly perhaps in connexion with the sweetness and classical animation of his style, and the lovely views he gives of nature s facts, that we ought to praise Hugh Miller. In an age prodigal of genius, yet abounding also in extravagance, glare, and bombast, the self-educated stone-mason wrote with the calmness and moderation of Addison. His powerful imagination was dis ciplined to draw just those lines, and to lay on just those colours, which should reanimate the past. As his friend Carruthers, an admirable critic of style, observed, "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 to high genius." Tens of thousands he has incited to the study of nature ; tens of thousands he has taught to find in geology no mere catalogue of defunct organisms, no dreary sermon in fossi! stones, but a "science of landscape" as well as an intelligent understanding of the rocky framework of the world. In 1871 appeared The Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, by Peter Bayne (2 vols., London). Miller s works have circulated on the European continent, and have been widely read in America. They have been issued in the United States in an edition of twenty volumes, comprising tlie Life and Letters. (P. B.) MILLER, WILLIAM (1781-1849), the founder of an American religious sect holding peculiar millennarian views, was born at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1 781. He received a very imperfect education. In the war of 1812 he served as captain of volunteers on the Canadian frontier. While residing at Low Hampton, N.Y., he began in 1833 publicly to lecture on the subject of the millennium, asserting that the second coming of Christ would take place in about ten years. His doctrines awakened wide interest among certain classes of the community. In 1840 a semi-monthly journal, The Signs of the Times, was started by one of his followers, and two years later the Advent Herald made its appearance. About 1843 the second coming of Christ was expected by as many as 50,000 believers in the doctrines of Miller ; and, although the disappointment of their hopes somewhat diminished their numbers, many continued their adherence to his tenets regarding the nature of the millen nium. At present the number of Millerites or Adventists is estimated at from 15,000 to 20,000. Miller died at New Hampton, Washington county, N.Y., December 20, 1849. MILLER, WILLIAM (1796-1882), one of the greatest of modern line-engravers, was born in Edinburgh on the 28th of May 1796. After studying in London under George Cook, a pupil of Basire s, he returned to his native city, where he continued to practise his art during a long lifetime. He executed plates after Thomson of Duddingston, Macculloch, D. O. Hill, Sir George Harvey, and other Scottish landscapists, but his most admirable and most voluminous works were his transcripts from Turner. The first of these was the Clovelly (1824), of The Southern Coast, a publication undertaken by his master and his brother William B. Cook, to which Miller also con tributed the Combe Martin and the Portsmouth. He was engaged on the illustrations of England and Wales, 1827-38 ; of The Rivers of France, 1833-35 ; of Roger s Poems, 1834; and very largely on those of The Prose and Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, 1834. In The Pro vincial Antiqiiities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland, 1826, he executed a few excellent plates after Thomson and Turner. Among his larger engravings of Turner s works may be mentioned The Grand Canal, Venice ; The Rhine, Osterprey, and Feltzen ; The Bell Rock; The Tower of London; and The Shepherd. The art of William Miller was warmly appreciated by Turner himself, and Mr Ruskin has pronounced him to be on the whole the most successful translator into line of the paintings of the greatest English landscapist. His renderings of complex Turnerian sky- effects are especially delicate and masterly. Towards the end of his life Miller abandoned engraving and occupied his leisure in the production of water-colours, many of which were exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy, of which he was an honorary member. He resumed his burin, however, to produce two final series of vignettes from drawings by Birket Foster illustrative of Hood s Poems, published by Moxon in 1871. Miller was a much respected member of the Society of Friends. He died while on a visit to Sheffield, on the 20th of January 1882. MILLER S THUMB (Coitus gobio), a well-known little fish, abundant in all rivers and lakes of northern and central Europe with clear water and gravelly bottom. The genus Cottus, to which the Miller s Thumb belongs, is easily recognized by its broad, flat head, rounded and scaleless body, large pectoral and narrow ventral fins, with two dorsal fins, the anterior shorter than the posterior ; the prseoperculum is armed with a simple or branched spine. The species of the genus Cottus are rather numerous, and are confined to the north temperate zone of the globe, the majority being marine, and known by the name of "Bull heads." The Miller s Thumb is confined to fresh water : and only one other freshwater species is found in Europe, C. poecilopiis, from rivers of Hungary, Galicia, and the Pyrenees ; some others occur in the fresh waters of northern Asia and North America. The Miller s Thumb is common in all suitable localities in Great Britain, but is extremely rare in Ireland ; in the Alps it reaches to an altitude exceeding 7000 feet. Its usual length is from 3 to 5 inches. Generally hidden under a stone or in a hollow of the bank, it watches for its prey, which consists of small aquatic animals, and darts when disturbed with extra ordinary rapidity to some other place of refuge. The female deposits her ova in a cavity under a stone, whilst the male watches and defends them until the young are
hatched and able to shift for themselves.