'Hugh Miller's unique position is that of a poetic student of the geological side of Nature, who possessed an unrivalled gift of vividly communicating to others the impressions made on his own mind by the observation of geological fact and by the inferences which such observation seemed to warrant. His lively imagination led him to seize more especially on those aspects of the past history of the earth which could be most vividly realised. He loved to collect the plants and animals of which the remains have been entombed among the rocks, and to re-people with them the scenes in which they lived long ages ago. Each scattered fact was marshalled by his eager fancy into its due place in the mental picture which he drew of such long-vanished lands, lakes, rivers, and seas. His enthusiasm supplied details where facts were wanting, and enabled him to kindle in his readers not a little of the burning interest which he felt himself. 'Long study of the best English literature had given Miller a rare mastery of his mother tongue. For elegance of narrative combined with clearness and vividness of description, I know no writing in the whole of scientific literature superior, or, indeed, perhaps equal to his. There can be no doubt that this literary gift, appealing as it did to so wide a circle of readers, formed a chief source of the influence which he exerted among his contemporaries. It was this that enabled him to spread so widely a curiosity to know something of geological science, and an interest in the progress of geological discovery. I do not think that the debt which geology owes to him for these services, in deepening the popular estimation of the science, and in increasing the number of its devotees, has ever been sufficiently acknowledged. During his lifetime, and for some years afterwards, Hugh Miller was looked upon by the general body of his countrymen as the leading geologist of his day. And this exaggerated but very natural estimate spread perhaps even more extensively in the United States. His books were to be found in the remotest log-hut of the Far West, and on both sides of the Atlantic ideas of the nature and scope of geology were largely drawn from them.