Hugh Miller

Title: First Impressions of England and its People.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The HISTORY OF BRITAIN & IRELAND collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. As well as historical works, this collection includes geographies, travelogues, and titles covering periods of competition and cooperation among the people of Great Britain and Ireland. Works also explore the countries' relations with France, Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Scandinavia. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Miller, Hugh; 1858. xx. 368 p.; 8 . 010360.cc.52.

The geological writings of Hugh Miller (1802–56) did much to publicise this relatively new science. After an early career in banking in Scotland, Miller became editor of a newly founded Edinburgh newspaper, The Witness, in which he published a series of his own articles based on his geological research, a collection of which was issued as a book, The Old Red Sandstone, in 1841, and led to the Devonian geological period becoming known as the 'Age of the Fishes'. Footprints of the Creator (1849) described his reconstruction of the extinct fish he had discovered in the Old Red Sandstone and argued, on theological grounds, that their perfection of development disproved the current Lamarckian theory of evolution. The book, illustrated with woodcuts, was written partly as a response to the then anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1884), also reissued in this series.

Hugh Miller must rate as one of the most extraordinary minds Scotland has produced. He rose, if not from absolute poverty, certainly from a modest background, to become both a specialist in the field of geology and a generalist in the wider literary world, covering, as writer and editor, subjects as diverse as poetry, folklore, science, education, religion, history and travel. In his working life he was a stonemason, banking accountant, journalist, editor, lecturer and defender of Christianity against the evolutionists. By the time of his tragic suicide in 1856, Miller's prodigious output had made him among the best known of Victorian literary figures, admired by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. First published in 1835, and extensively enlarged and revised in his lifetime, this book was the Cromarty stonemason's first important book, and is a monument to his pioneering work as a folklorist and social historian.His gifts as a storyteller are never shown to better effect than in this book, whether recounting legends of ghosts, fairies, mermaids and witches, or telling the true tales of Ross and Cromarty's history - from the eccentric life of Sir Thomas Urquhart to the cholera epidemics of the 1830s.