SOURCE: Clarke, John M. “Hugh Miller and His Centenary.” New England Magazine n.s. 27, no. 5 (January 1903): 551-63.

In the following essay, Clarke assesses Miller's reputation in his native Scotland and in America on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.

The people of Scotland have just been celebrating with unbounded enthusiasm the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hugh Miller.

In America Miller's name is not very familiar to the younger generation, but to those in the prime of life who, thirty or forty years ago, were reading with susceptible minds, it recalls diverse impressions: the story of a remarkable life, telling with wonderful beauty and cleverness of the rise from humblest beginnings to a conspicuous and influential climacteric; the scientific investigations of a geologist among the rocks and fossils of the Old Red Sandstone and the lavas of the Bass Rock; fulminations against a crude form...