'I count it as one of the privileges of my life to have known Hugh Miller, and as one of its chief losses that he was so suddenly removed when I had hardly realised the full value of his friendship and of his genial enthusiasm. His writings formed my earliest geological text-books, and I shall never cease to look back upon their influence with gratitude. They ought to be far more widely read than they seem now to be. Assuredly no young geologist will find more stimulating chapters than those penned by the author of the _Old Red Sandstone_.' The statue erected to him by his countrymen presents to the eye of the traveller one of the most striking features of the landscape as he approaches the little town of Cromarty. No more fitting scene could be found than that which commands the magnificent sweep of water over which Miller's eye had ranged when a boy. Of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh he had said that no monument could be in keeping and in character that was not Gothic; and no one to himself could be true that forgot the interpreter of the Old Red Sandstone. As late as 1836, Buckland in his _Bridgewater Treatise_ had briefly dismissed it, and it was a new revelation in geology to make known its scientific importance. In dedicating the book to Sir Roderick Murchison, who had been born at Taradale on the Beauly Firth in 1792, he could say that Smith, the father of English geology, had been born upon the Oolite: they, he added, had been born upon the Old Red. Rarely could nature afford a more striking example of the true and the picturesque, than in these two widely differing memorials, the one in the Princes Street of his 'own romantic town,' the other looking over the expanse of the Cromarty Firth. In life these men had never met, and in type they were totally distinct. Yet in the great features of integrity and force of character no two men could more strikingly agree. Both wrote with their eyes on the object, and both were loyal to fact. Of Miller we may say what Carlyle had said of Sir Walter, that no sounder piece of British manhood had been put together in this century of time, and that, when he departed, he took a man's life along with him.