interpreter between nature and the public,' and to perform the service of narrating as pleasingly as he could, the facts which he culled in walks not previously trodden, and of describing, as graphically as might be, the inferences which he drew from them. Ever after his first day's experience as an apprenticed mason in a stone-quarry, of which he has left more than one impressive account, he was led to interest himself in the diversified characters of the rocks of the district. Even as a boy he had been familiar with the more obvious varieties of stone to be met with in a tract of country wherein the sedimentary formations of the Lowlands and the crystalline masses of the Highlands have been thrown side by side. But he had been attracted to them rather on account of their singular shapes or brilliant colours, than from any regard to what might have been their different modes of origin. Now, however, he had discovered that these rocks are really monuments, wherein are recorded portions of the past history of the earth, and he was full of hope that by patient study he might yet be able to decipher them. The supply of elementary treatises and text-books of science, in the present day so abundant, had hardly at that time begun to come into existence. Geology, indeed, had but recently attained a recognised position as a distinct branch of science. And even had the young stone-mason been able to possess himself of the whole of the scanty geological literature of the time, it included no book that would have solved for him the problems that daily confronted him as he pursued his labours in the quarry, or rambled in leisure hours along the shore. The best treatise which could have fallen into his hands and which would have been full of enlightenment and suggestion for him--Playfair's immortal _Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory_--had appeared seventeen years before; but we have no evidence that it came in his way. He had laboriously to work out his problems for himself. Innumerable as are the subjects for geological enquiry offered by the district of Cromarty, it was fortunate for Hugh Miller, and not less so for the cause of science, that chance placed him face to face in the most practical way with the Old Red Sandstone, and that he was, as it were, compelled to attempt to understand its history. While the lessons taught by the strata of the quarry had greatly impressed him, the abundant and well-preserved fossils among the Lias shales of the Eathie shore, which at spare moments he visited, had deepened that impression. It was while endeavouring to find these shales nearer home, on the western side of the Southern Sutor, that he stumbled upon the clays which contain the fish-bearing nodules of the Old Red Sandstone. This happy discovery, which was made in the autumn of 1830, the year after the publication of his _Poems_, marks an eventful epoch in his life, as well as an important date in the history of geological investigation.