MILLAR, James, was born at Ayr in 1762. Educated at the university of Glasgow, he became a minister of the Scottish church. Turning his attention to scientific pursuits, he afterwards practised for several years at Paisley as a physician. He was finally employed to superintend the fourth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, to which he contributed many important articles. He also edited Williams' Mineral Kingdom, and the Encyclopædia Edinensis. He died in 1827.—W. J. P.
MILLAR, John, Professor of civil law at the university of Glasgow, was the son of the minister of the parish of Shotts, where he was born in 1735. He studied at Glasgow university for the church, but exchanged theology for law. He was much influenced by Adam Smith; and becoming tutor in the family of Lord Karnes, these two men determined the bent of his mind. A year after he became an advocate, he was appointed (1761) professor of civil law at Glasgow, and by the vivacity of his lectures and his enthusiasm as an instructor, made his chair one of the most popular in the university. After occupying it for forty years, he died in 1801. Professor Millar was a whig, and something more. He published "Observations concerning the origin and distinction of ranks in society," 1771, to the fourth edition of which (1806) a biography of him was prefixed by his nephew, Mr. John Craig; "Elements of the Law relating to Insurance," 1787; and in 1787-90 his best known work, his "Historical View of the English Government, from the settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the accession of the house of Stuart." A posthumous edition of this work, continued to the Revolution, was published in 1803. It suggested a very interesting and animated account of Millar, as a man, a professor, and a thinker, from the pen of Lord Jeffrey, in No. 5 of the Edinburgh Review. From the knowledge and enthusiasm displayed in the article, it was thought that the reviewer must have been a pupil of Millar's—a mistake corrected in Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey.—F. E.
MILLER, Hugh, geologist and journalist, was born in Cromarty, on the north-east coast of Scotland, October 10, 1802. His father was the grandson of John Feddes, one of the last of the buccaneers on the Spanish main, and was the owner of a trading sloop, in which he perished in a storm in the Cromarty Firth, when Hugh was five years of age. On his mother's side he was the fifth in descent from Donald Roy, one of the worthies of Ross-shire, who was held in high estimation by his countrymen for his strong religious convictions, which were not free from a tinge of superstition, and procured for him the reputation of being a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams. He was also notable in his day for his sturdy vindication of the spiritual privileges of the parishioners of Nigg against an act of intrusion on the part of the moderate majority in the Church of Scotland, from the communion of which, however, he felt constrained to secede. Hugh traced his earliest intellectual impulses to two uncles, men of remarkable shrewdness and integrity of character, who, on the death of his father, took his place in the work of instruction and discipline. They were men of very different intellectual type and temperament, and distinguished by marked individuality of character; and in his "Schools and Schoolmasters" Hugh acknowledges that to their united influence he was more indebted for his real education than to any of the teachers whose schools he afterwards attended. To one of them, who had been in the navy and seen much of the world, he owed his earliest lessons in natural history, for which this observant sailor had a decided taste. Hugh was sent to a dame's school where he was taught to read, and on the Sabbath evenings his uncle imparted to him religious knowledge, with the aid of the Shorter Catechism. By the time he was in his tenth year he had read Blind Harry's Wallace, which made him "thoroughly a Scot;" and his early "consciousness of country" was confirmed by his subsequently making the acquaintance of Barbour's Bruce. In the parish school he entered on the Rudiments of the Latin language, but found the Rudiments to be the dullest book he had ever seen. He made no progress in Latin, but contrived stealthily to peruse English translations of Virgil and Ovid; and in the absence of a book of amusement would entertain his nearest class-fellows with the adventures of his sailor uncle, with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll, and Robinson Crusoe, of Sinbad and Ulysses, till having exhausted his little world of fiction he set himself to extemporize the biographies of warriors and the adventures of travellers, and finally established a reputation as the story-teller of the school, his indulgent teacher dubbing him the "Sennachie." He even began to write verses, and his career at school terminated in a smart poetical lampoon on a new pedagogue (to say nothing of a personal tussle at parting) who had evinced less tenderness than his predecessor towards young Hugh's desultory habits and vagrant fancies. In the meantime he was introduced, in the library of a friend, to the British essayists, from Addison to Mackenzie. He studied Pope, the minor poets, and the writings of Goldsmith, together with a miscellaneous collection of travels and voyages translated from the French, and translations from the German of Lavater, Zimmerman, and Klopstock. Beyond the pale of the school he had begun to diversify his rural excursions by collecting specimens of the rocks, and classifying their constituents. In addition to a respectable amount of knowledge of the primary rocks of his native district, Hugh had, while yet in his teens, studied many of the invertebrate animals of the sea-shore, which have only of late years become objects of attention to the philosophical zoologist. In his intercourse with the highlands of Ross-shire and Sutherlandshire the poetical and romantic elements of his nature found ample scope in clan stories and local traditions and superstitions, which were afterwards embodied in one of his earliest publications; and he records the interesting fact of having seen two of the men who fought at Culloden, with not a few who witnessed the battle at a distance, and how an old lady narrated to him her personal reminiscences of the last burning for witchcraft which took place in Scotland. Lender such varied influences the many-sided mind of Hugh Miller was becoming gradually developed, and prepared for the prominent position he was destined to occupy in the science and literature of his country. When he left school, he tells us, he was "a wild insubordinate boy," and he had yet to undergo a long course of training in that world-wide school "in which toil and hardship are the severe but noble teachers." His uncles were desirous that he should study for the church. Hugh's preference was to be a mason. He pleaded that he had no "call" to be a minister, and this plea won the acquiescence of his worthy uncles. "Better," said they, "be a poor mason, better be anything honest, however humble, than an uncalled minister." Hugh therefore became a mason, with the resolution "that much of his leisure time should be given to careful observation and the study of our best English authors." Throughout seventeen long years, that is, from his seventeenth to his thirty-fourth year, he led the life of an operative mason, often working in districts of the country far remote from his native Cromarty, exposed to many hardships and privations, denying himself to every pernicious indulgence, and steadily and earnestly employing his leisure hours in self-cultivation, "keeping his conscience clear and his curiosity fresh," and not without hope meanwhile that he might yet rise above the necessity of daily toil, and find a congenial vocation in letters or science. It was while travelling from place to place, working as one of a "squad" in the quarry or the shed, and lodging in highland bothies or in hovels in lowland villages, that Miller was following up and systematizing his early geological observations, and cultivating an intimate acquaintance with the best English and Scotch authors in all departments of literature, including the philosophical works of Reid, Locke, Kames, Hume, Dugald Stewart, and Adam Smith. In 1825, when employment failed him in the north, he proceeded to Edinburgh and obtained an engagement as a stone-cutter. He now made his first acquaintance with the carboniferous system, which he took every opportunity afforded by his evening walks of exploring; groping his way, as he says, in the absence of such digests of geological science as are now so common, without assistance and without even a vocabulary. He was not a little gratified during his residence in the neighbourhood, with the preaching of Dr. M'Crie, for whom, as the biographer of Knox, he entertained a deep veneration, and whose ministrations he frequently attended. The precarious state of his health induced him to return to Cromarty after having spent two years in the metropolis, not without adding materially to his knowledge both of men and books. At this time his religious views became of a more definite character. As might have been expected from his thoughtful habits, he had struggled through a period of doubt, till he was able to attach intellect and heart alike to "the true centre of an efficient christianity, the Word made flesh." The opinions he now formed he never found occasion to alter, and they constituted the ruling principles of his future life. On recovering his wonted health and elasticity of mind. Miller began to execute petty jobs on his own account, such as sculptur-
