put an end to what seems to him a retrograde step in civilization. It also appears so to me, but I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized. So long as the sufferers by the bad law do not invoke assistance from other communities, I cannot admit that persons entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and require that a condition of things with which all who are directly interested appear to be satisfied, should be put an end to because it is a scandal to persons some thousands of miles distant, who have no part or concern in it. Let them send missionaries, if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means (of which silencing the teachers is not one), oppose the progress of similar doctrines among their own people. If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much. to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians.

VOL. XV.-8

HUGH MILLER.

MILLER, HUGH, a noted Scottish geologist and scientific writer; born at Cromarty, October 10, 1802; died by his own hand at Portobello, near Edinburgh, December 2, 1856. He was, in his seventeenth year, apprenticed to a relative, who was a stone-mason and quarryman. He worked at this occupation until his thirty-fourth year. During these years he read largely and wrote for periodi cals; and as early as 1829 put forth a volume of "Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason." Even before he entered upon his apprenticeship as a stone-mason his attention had been turned toward geology, especially toward fossilography; and before he had reached his thirtieth year he had come to be widely known as a profound geologist. The trade of a stone-cutter is among the most unhealthy known, and he gave up the occupation for the position of accountant in a bank in his native town. In 1840 he became editor of a newspaper called "The Witness." About 1850 he began to write his book, "The Testimony of the Rocks," upon which he labored incessantly, taking little sleep or exercise. The work was just finished when he became aware that his mind was giving way. He retired to his study and wrote a brief note to his wife, in which he said: "A fearful dream rises upon me: I cannot bear the horrible thought." The next morning he was found dead, with a bullet in his breast. The principal works of Hugh Miller are "Poems of a Journeyman Mason" (1829); "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland" (1835); "The Old Red Sandstone" (1841); "The Geology of the Bass Rock" (1848); "The Footprints of the Creator," a reply to Robert Chambers's "Vestiges of Creation" (1849); "My Schools and Schoolmasters" (1854); "The Testimony of the Rocks" (1857).

FIRST STUDIES IN GEOLOGY.

(From "The Old Red Sandstone.")

IT was twenty years last February since I set out a little before sunrise to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint, and I have rarely had a heavier heart than

on that morning. I was now going to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods; a reader of curious books, when I could get them; a gleaner of old traditionary stories. And now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they be enabled to toil.

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay — or frith, rather—with a little, clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir-wood on the other. It had been opened in the old red sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments, which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel blistered my hands; but the pain was by no means very severe, and I wrought hard and willingly that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks and wedges and levers were applied by my brother workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder.

The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one. It had the merit, too, of being attended with some degree of danger, as a boat or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots. The fragments flew in every direction; and an immense mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay down their tools. I looked up and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir-wood beside us, and the long,

dark shadows of the trees stretching downward toward the shore.

This was no formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought, and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother workmen..

All the workmen rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm

as if they had been traced upon canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards; and then on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white and all below was purple. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the inferior strata, and our first employment, on resuming our labors, was to raise it from its bed. I assisted the other workmen in placing it on edge, and was much struck by the appearance of the platform on which it had rested. The entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before. I 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; and I had observed it a hundred and a hundred times when sailing my little schooner in the shallows left by the ebb. But what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock; or of what element had they been composed? I felt as completely at a loss as Robinson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man's foot on the sand.

The evening furnished me with still further cause of wonder.

We raised another block in a different part of the quarry, and found that the area of a circular depression in the stratum below was broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool, recently dried up, which had shrunken and split in the hardening. Several large stones came rolling down from the diluvium in the course of the afternoon. They were of different qualities from the sandstone below, and from one another; and, what was more wonderful still, they were all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed about in the sea, or the bed of a river, for hundreds of years. There could not surely be a more conclusive proof that the bank which had enclosed them so long could not have been created on the rock on which it rested. No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article, and the stones were all half-worn! And, if not the bank, why then the sandstone underneath? I was lost in conjecture, and found I had food enough for thought that evening, without once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labor.

The immense masses of diluvium which we had to clear away rendered the working of the quarry laborious and expensive, and all the party quitted it in a few days to make trial of another that seemed to promise better. The one we left is situated, as I have said, on the southern shore of an inland bay -the Bay of Cromarty; the one to which we removed had been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Firth.

I soon found that I was to be no loser by the change. Not the united labors of a thousand men for more than a thousand years could have furnished a better section of the geology of the district than this range of cliffs. It may be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth's crust. We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. discovered the still little-known, but highly interesting, fossils of the old red sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rocks, basalts, ironstones, hyperstenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists.

We