But in his strictly scientific passages this is not so. There the style is simple in expression and close in reasoning. When we consider the great amount of solid literary performance, and of minute observation, recorded in his _Cruise of the Betsey_ and his _Rambles of a Geologist_, extending over the West Coast and the Orkneys--when we know that much of his work consisted of papers in _The Witness_, republished, like _The Old Red Sandstone_, in book form with the necessary additions, we shall wonder at the fertility and the quickness of the mind that could, in the midst of distracting journalistic demands on his time and attention, produce such a mass of varied and finished work in science and literature. And of the work in _The Witness_ as a political writer, we need only say that the present ecclesiastical condition of Scotland bears largely his impress. Till he came and gave expression to the feeling of the country in the columns of his paper, the people had to a considerable extent believed the question at issue to be one that concerned mainly the clergy. This had been the standpoint of the Moderate organs, in a wary attempt to win over the laity. But by the _Letter to Brougham_ he won the ear of the people, and to the end he never lost it. By 1841 the political candidates in Scotland at the general election had proclaimed themselves, with a single exception, in favour of some distinct alteration of the law of patronage. Whether Church papers are or are not a blessing--in England they have become a menace to political action and a medium for the most offensive clericalism and reactionary measures--may safely be left out of account in settling the question in his own case, for, as we have seen, he had never consented to make his paper a merely ecclesiastical organ. But of the work which he accomplished as a leader-writer and as an exponent of popular rights we have the unhesitating estimate of Guthrie: 'The battle of Christ's rights as Head of the Church, and of the people's rights as members of the body of which He is the Head, was fought and won in every town and a large number of the parishes of Scotland, mainly by Hugh Miller, through the columns of _The Witness_ newspaper.' Of it he himself, in the closing sentences of the _Schools and Schoolmasters_, could say with modesty that it took its place among our first-class Scottish newspapers, and that it numbered among its subscribers a larger percentage of readers with a university education than any other. Nor would he, perhaps, have considered it as among the least of his journalistic successes that his name and connection could win for the elder Bethune, at the close of his wintry day, the proposed editorship of the _Dumfries Standard_, which would have done much to have brightened the life of his old fellow-contributor to Wilson's _Border Tales_ had not the poet been removed before him by death.