ing their pastors. In May 1839 the House of Lords decided that the rights of patronage were 'inconsistent with the exercise of any volition on the part of the people, however expressed/ Miller and others saw that an ecclesiastical reform bill for Scotland was needful to restore the Scottish people's rights, and to rouse popular feeling on the question he published two powerful pamphlets, 'A Letter to Lord Brougham' and 'The Whiggism of the Old School,' 1839, in which he ably stated the popular view. In January 1840 he was offered by the leaders of his party the non-intrusionists the editorship of their new organ, the 'Witness,' a bi-weekly newspaper. He accepted the post with diffidence, but, once settled at the editorial desk in Edinburgh, he proved that he was in his right place. He impressed his personality on the paper, and it rapidly attained a very wide circulation. His leading articles, to which he devoted the utmost care, were invariably brilliant and convincing. The movement grew, and Miller's part in it was only second to that of Chalmers. Signatures to non-intrusion petitions increased fivefold. At the general election of 1841 all the Scottish parliamentary candidates, with a single exception, were advocating some popular modification of patronage. In 1843 the disruption came, and the free church, embracing two-thirds of the members of the church of Scotland, was established. In the free church, at the outset, Miller saw an opportunity for realising his ideal of a national church. The free church, reared alongside the establishment (which he at that time held with Chalmers to have become a 'moral nullity'), was to overshadow and absorb it without self-aggrandisement, and by pure moral force. 'The church of the future,' he insisted, 'must be missionary, not political.' But, to his sorrow, the free church, after the death of Chalmers, and under other leaders, abandoned, in his opinion, her high claims by identifying her position with that of a dissenting sect.
Throughout this exciting period science was Miller's relaxation. In 1840 his well-known book on 'The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field,' appeared serially in the 'Witness,' and was re-published in 1841, with remarkable figures of 'Old Red' fishes from his own pencil. By this work, wrote Buckland, geologists were astonished and delighted. They at once accorded to the old red sandstone, as a formation, an importance scarcely before recognised. His technical ichthyology was based on Agassiz's contemporary researches among the fishes of the 'Old Red,' but it contained important improvements, and the best part of the work was founded entirely on original observation. 'The more I study the fishes of the "Old Red,'" wrote Professor Huxley twenty years afterwards, 'the more I am struck with the patience and sagacity manifested in Hugh Miller's researches, and by the natural insight, which in his case seems to have supplied the place of special anatomical knowledge.' His common sense gave him a grasp of the scientific method in palaeontology, while his imagination enabled him to pictorially restore ancient physical geographies.
In 1845, broken down in health by excessive labour, he visited England, and his 'First Impressions of England and its People' appeared in 1846. In 1847 he published 'Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness.' This was a reply to the 'Vestiges of Creation,' and a contribution both to Christian apologetics and to palaeontology. Many of the fossils described were supplied to Miller by his friend, Robert Dick [q. v.] of Thurso. To the American edition Agassiz affixed a memoir of the writer. The doctrine of development Miller here held to be irreconcilable with the dogmas of Christianity. He argued for the miracle of creation versus the law of development, and set himself to prove that the earliest fossils, and more especially the fishes of the 'Old Red,' were as advanced of their kind as those that have lived since or that live now.
In 1848 Miller contributed a geological section to McCrie's work on the Bass Rock, and in 1852 he published his autobiography 'My Schools and Schoolmasters.' 'Truly I am glad,' wrote Thomas Carlyle to him of this work, 'to condense the bright but indistinct rumour labelled to me by your Name, for years past, into the ruddy-visaged, strong-boned, glowing Figure of a Man which I have got, and bid good speed to, with all my heart! You have, as you undertook to do, painted many things to us: scenes of life, scenes of Nature, which rarely come upon the canvas; and I will add, such Draughtsmen too are extremely uncommon in that and in other walks of painting. There is a right genial fire in the Book, everywhere nobly tempered down into peaceful, radical heat, which is very beautiful to see. Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, strong, and breezy, like the "Old Red Sandstone Mountains" in a sunny summer day.'
Miller's last volume, which received its final corrections on the day of his death, 'The Testimony of the Rocks '(1857) mainly deals, like 'The Footprints,' with the borderland between science and religion. Miller took
