The _Vestiges_, like its more famous successor, was violently attacked
as irreligious. One of its opponents, from a point of view half orthodox
and half scientific, was Hugh Miller, a man of sterling excellence, of
an interesting and in its close melancholy career, of real importance as
a geologist, and possessed of an extremely agreeable literary faculty.
Miller was born at Cromarty in 1802, and though more than fairly
educated, held till he was past thirty no higher position than that of a
stone-mason. He had begun to write, however, earlier than this, and,
engaging in particular in the two rather dissimilar subjects of geology
and "Free Kirk" polemic, he was made editor of the _Witness_, a
newspaper started in the interest of the new principles. After nearly
twenty busy years of journalism and authorship he shot himself in
December 1856, as it is supposed in a fit of insanity brought on by
overwork. Miller was a very careful observer, and his _Old Red
Sandstone_ (1841) made a great addition to the knowledge of fossils. He
followed this up by a great number of other works, some merely
polemical, others descriptive of his own life and travels. In all the
better parts of Hugh Miller's writings there is a remarkable style,
extremely popular and unpretentious but never trivial or slipshod, which
is not far below the best styles of the century for its special purpose,
though in some respects it smacks more of the eighteenth, and has a
certain relation with that of White of Selborne.

The most considerable literary gifts of the century among men of science
probably belonged to a man more than twenty years younger than Miller,
and more than fifteen younger than Darwin, who died so recently that
until the greater part of this book was written it seemed that he would
have no place in it. Thomas Henry Huxley, born in May 1825, at Ealing,
studied medicine, and becoming a navy doctor, executed like Darwin a
voyage to the South Seas. His scientific work, though early
distinguished, met with no great encouragement from the Admiralty, and
he left the service, though he held many public appointments in later
life. He became F.R.S. at six-and-twenty, and from that time onwards
till his sixtieth year he was a busy professor, lecturer, member of
commissions, and (for a time) inspector of fisheries. In the ever
greater and greater specialising of science which has taken place,
Huxley was chiefly a morphologist. But outside the range of