14 Facts About Hugh Miller

Hugh Miller was a Scottish geologist, writer and folklorist.

Hugh Miller's father died in a shipwreck in 1807, and he was brought up by his mother and uncles.

Hugh Miller was educated in a parish school where he reportedly showed a love of reading.

Hugh Miller was expelled from the school following an unrelated incident.

In 1840 the popular party in the Church, with which he had been associated, started a newspaper, the Witness, and Hugh Miller was called to be editor in Edinburgh, a position which he retained until the end of his life.

Hugh Miller was an influential writer and speaker in the early Free Church.

Hugh Miller held that the Earth was of great age, and that it had been inhabited by many species which had come into being and gone extinct, and that these species were homologous; although he believed the succession of species showed progress over time, he did not believe that later species were descended from earlier ones.

Hugh Miller denied the Epicurean theory that new species occasionally budded from the soil, and the Lamarckian theory of development of species, as lacking evidence.

Geology, to Hugh Miller, offered a better version of the argument from design than William Paley could provide, and answered the objections of sceptics, by showing that living species did not arise by chance or by impersonal law.

For most of 1856, Hugh Miller had severe headaches and mental distress, and the most probable diagnosis is of psychotic depression.

Hugh Miller feared that he might harm his wife or children because of persecutory delusions.

Hugh Miller's second daughter, Harriet Miller Davidson was a published poet who married a clergyman after her father's suicide.

Hugh Miller moved to Adelaide where her husband was a minister and she published poems and stories in both countries about temperance and of daughters left by inspirational fathers.

The Hugh Miller Trail starts at a small car park on a minor road just past Eathie Mains, about 3 miles south of Cromarty, and leads about 1 mile down a steep slope through woodland to the foreshore at Eathie Haven on the Moray Firth, where Miller began collecting fossils.