Natural history review Volume 1 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854 edition. Excerpt: ...From a very early period, one of his uncles (Alexander) appears to have exercised a very strong influence on his after life; and it is interesting to find that " he had a decided turn for natural history." Mr. Miller's collection still contains a murex which " Uncle Sandy" had transformed from the bank to his pocket, during the landing in Egypt, under Sir Ealph Abercrombie--for he was a sailor. In his twelfth year he was transferred to the grammar school of the parish, where, among other studies, he learned a good deal of "pig-anatomy," and "the take and curing of herrings," both of which he had ample opportunities of observing, and which his even then keen, intelligent eye did not neglect. The school, in its ordinary acceptation, was not where Mr. Miller was fitted to write the " Foot-prints of the Creator," or "The Old Red Sandstone;" his leisure hours were spent on the Cromarty beach, sauntering over the pebble beds, observing the component parts of the different rocks which lay strewed around; and totally deficient of a scientific vocabulary, by a self-devised system of notation he had learned to form an idea of the mineralogical character of the rocks he was studying. The self-reliant, thoughtful boy now was truly father to the man; such mental exercise was true education, and worth more, for all the practical purposes of life, than hours trifled away in profitless labour, where neither the head nor the heart are really engaged. We cannot loiter over the tempting narrative of the early days of the poet; for then he wrote verses; and naturalist; not even the description of the dreamer, " Francie," who certainly must have been a playmate and fellow-trifler of our own...