Three memoirs of Hugh Miller (1802–1856) by his son Hugh Miller FGS

Abstract

Hugh Miller FGS (1850–1896) wrote a set of three memoirs on his father Hugh Miller (1802–1856), geologist, writer and newspaper editor. The first two are successive versions of a text written about 1883 to accompany a portrait of the elder Miller by the pioneering photographers David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848). The second version appeared, much delayed, in Calotypes, an album of their work, in 1928. The book's editor, Andrew Elliot (1830–1921), had, in partnership with John Shepherd, briefly published Miller's Testimony of the Rocks of 1857. A third version is the 1894 entry on Hugh Miller in the Dictionary of National Biography. The three memoirs, the only biographical writings on the elder Miller by his son, contain useful material, including a notable assessment of his palaeontological work by Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895).