INTRODUCTION.

THE birth-place of W. J. C. Miller has been well described by his own pen in that one of his "studies" entitled "A Devonian Headland." The spot itself, the headland, "deep within the great West Bay of Dorset and Devon "-which he has not only described in picturesque language, but has invested with a multitude of literary associations and natural attractions which, in the words of Falstaff, must "serve as medicines to make us love it" is at once recognised as an ideal training ground for such a lover of Nature and romance and literature.

The "hamlet that lies in the eastern valley," and which he has veiled under the name of "Chalcombe," bears, he tells us, a Norse name which has, moreover, been extended to the headland itself. This Norse name is Beer Head, and it was here, on August 31st, 1832, that William John Clarke Miller entered into life.

The pleasures and associations of the boyhood spent in this spot are all set forth in the charming little study which has been mentioned. It is of these days and of their influence on his life that he speaks when he says, "More than one young Selbornian has, amidst scenes like these, acquired tastes and laid up knowledge through which he has been enabled to find delight in the most unpoetic duties that he might afterwards have had to perform"; or when he apostrophises the natural attraction of his native spot:

"How delightful it was in the old-world days to which these notes refer, to watch the graceful wheatears, in pleasant family parties, dotted about over the downs; to observe the motions and catch the pleasant chirpings of the stonechats and the whinchats among the furze bushes; to watch the swift and dazzling flight of the kingfisher, and find its nest by the river bank; to note the stately heron, patiently fishing in the stream or sailing slowly off to another resting place; to look out for the early arrival of the spring migrants; to hear the cuckoo's welcome voice, or by the delightful turr-turr of the turtle-doves in the woods to be reminded that, for six months at least, we might say with Virgil's Melibæus :

From the village school he went to the Independent College of Taunton, where he had for a time the teaching of a distinguished mathematician, and from whence he matriculated with mathematical honours at the University of London. Then came the great disappointment of his life. He was desirous to enter the great Mathematical University of Cambridge; but his parents belonged to the sect that had trampled down King, Church and Aristocracy one after the other; that had formed an army that had never met an enemy that could stand its onset; and had sent across the Atlantic a band which, seeking for a land of tolerance, had founded the United States of America. Thus they could not endure that a son of theirs should submit to the tests then imposed in the University, so he had to relinquish his desire. Years afterwards he learned from eminent mathematicians that the best of all science is learned by one's self and never derived from any professors at College or University.

Then he turned to study and instruction in mathematics; and after teaching at various institutions, settled finally as Professor of Mathematics at Huddersfield College, Yorkshire, of which institution he also became Vice-principal.

Here he remained many years, and here it was that he devised and, after many trials, got a publisher to undertake the series of mathematical volumes which he continued to edit right up to 1897. It was in 1861 that he conceived the idea of devising some plan whereby the contributions to the mathematical columns of the Educational Times, which had been for some years under his editorship, might be preserved apart from other matter in a more convenient form than could be furnished by the pages of the journal. Some time was necessarily spent in ascertaining the views and wishes of the contributors, and obtaining the requisite promises of support; and then, from midsummer, 1863, the mathematical solutions and articles that appeared in each number were printed off from the type of the journal, and at the end of a year the collection was, in July, 1864, issued as the first of the series of volumes. Later on, the narrow columns at first employed having proved inconvenient for printing mathematical expressions, wider columns were adopted, both in the journal and the succeeding mathematical volumes; and then the contributors were not content to wait a year for the volumes, so the issues ultimately took place at half-yearly intervals, and to them were added many articles for which space could not be found in the journal itself. The series that took its rise from such small beginnings (very few were the supporters in 1863) has gone on continuously from that time to this.

In these volumes there have appeared articles in almost all branches of mathematics, and the leading mathematicians of all countries have continuously helped the work forward. Among the early contributors was Dr. Hirst, F.R.S., who developed in

various articles the elegant branches of geometry in which so much interest was taken, and who finally collected and published his contributions in a separate volume. Other important articles were by Professor Cayley, and the then comparatively new theory of Local Probability was largely discussed and developed in the earlier volumes by such writers as Woolhouse, Clarke, Crofton, Stephen Watson, the late Professor E. B. Seitz, who was a great master of difficult probability problems, and others. Professor Sylvester was another prolific contributor, so prolific, in fact, that from the very first volume there was not one that did not contain a number of articles from his pen. The prematurely lost and still-lamented Professor Clifford, who was a fellow Devonian with Mr. Miller, contributed his very earliest mathematical solutions to the first volume, and his articles went on increasing in numbers and value through many succeeding volumes, accompanied by letters to Mr. Miller which contained comments, or developed views, that were often more interesting than the articles themselves. Nearly all these contributors have long ago passed into the silent land, but many of them have left behind them some record of their esteem for their conscientious and untiring fellow-labourer who still lingers with us. Thus Professor Sylvester-who must be classed among the first of English mathematicians-speaks of him as: "an excellent mathematician, extensively and critically versed in all parts of the science, a good writer and lecturer on various subjects of natural science and other parts of human knowledge lying outside his own more special pursuits, and a most able and painstaking editor. His scientific attainments are of a high order; he is deeply skilled in nearly all the departments of the highest mathematics, and is a novice in none. His labour as mathematical editor of the Educational Times, in which his own original papers are fit company for those of our foremost analysts, is proof of that. It would be a mistake to suppose him a mere schoolmaster or a mere mathematician. He is a sound classical scholar, and an erudite man of letters."

The late Professor Clifford considered that the mathematical portion of the Educational Times, had "done more to suggest and encourage original research than any other European periodical." Similar testimony has been borne by Sir Robert S. Ball, Professors Tait, Crofton, Townsend, Todhunter, Cayley, and others. We have to bear in mind also, that when Mr. Miller commenced this important work he had then but what was an obscure and almost unknown journal as a means of intercommunication and publication. Now there are 500 vigorous contributors in all parts of the globe. Many are educated Hindoos (professors and others), others are Americans, Australians, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Italians, Spaniards; while some write from the South American Republics.

Nor was his work for the Educational Times confined to the

mathematical section alone, for with the energy and far-reaching activity which have always dominated him, he at various times wrote for its columns many articles on literary and natural history topics, in addition to doing a large portion of the reviews of new publications.

Being an ardent lover of Nature and literature, Mr. Miller has all his life striven, by lecturing, writing and teaching, to aid others to share the delights which such a love engenders. During his Vice-principalship of Huddersfield College, he edited for his students the Huddersfield College Magazine, a periodical which he started and carried on for several years solely with the object of fostering a love of Nature and literature and general knowledge among his students. To it he contributed various interesting articles himself, while several young contributors came forward who afterwards attained to eminence, one of them having within recent times written an able work on the geography and resources of Africa. Then I find from the pen of Mrs. Miller some interesting sketches of a tour in Switzerland, and of rambles in Cornwall and Devon and other places. Mr. Miller, in fact, once confided to me that his wife and the college boys ultimately came to write so well that he felt himself perforce obliged to relinquish the work entirely to them.

In 1876 he obtained the highly responsible post of Executive Officer (Registrar and Secretary) of the General Medical Council, an office which he held until his enforced retirement in 1897, continuing his mathematical work as an employment for his leisure time.

The multifarious work of the General Medical Council has more than quadrupled since Mr. Miller took it in charge twentythree years ago. Established to carry out the voluminous Medical Acts (which cover fifty-nine pages of the Medical Register), the Council had to take charge, in 1878, of all the dentists in the empire, and since then of various other matters, including, quite recently, the registration of sanitary officers. Many testimonies to the appreciation of Mr. Miller's services have been given by the Council, and by the medical newspapers. The British Medical Journal, in reviewing the Minutes of the General Medical Council, says:- "The volume has been edited by Mr. W. J. C. Miller, B.A., the Registrar of the General Council, with the care which he has accustomed us to expect from him.” The Report of the Statistical Committee of the General Medical Council is another work of which Mr. Miller had charge, and in noticing this the Medical Press says:- "We assume that its compilation is chiefly due to the energy and noted mathematical skill of Mr. Miller, the Registrar of the Council, and if we are correct in this assumption we can only remark that both the profession and the Medical Council owe that gentleman much thanks for work which, though no doubt a labour of love, must involve great devotion of time and mental capacity." Another work

of the utmost importance to the public, and for the annual publication of which Mr. Miller was responsible, is the Medical Register, which has now grown to a volume of 1,555 pages. In addition to this there is the Dentists' Register (236 pages), besides the Medical Students' Register, the latter alone requiring 100

pages,

Soon after obtaining the post at the Medical Council, Mr. Miller went to live at Richmond, that most beautiful of London suburbs, the natural attractions of which he has dwelt upon in such articles as that entitled "A Bird-loved Suburb of London." Here in his pretty Thames-side residence-upon which was bestowed the name of "The Paragon "-with its little garden "that runs on one side steeply down to the banks of the Thames "-the garden he has described in the sketch entitled "Nature Pleasures of a Riverside Garden "-he found still time to devote to his favourite pursuits. Nor should it be supposed that the observations made in the "little garden," or in the London park, or during a half holiday in the environs of Huddersfield, suffer because there made; for Gilbert White, who astonished a century with the possibilities of observation in an ordinary rural parish, and the ever-regretted Richard Jefferies, our English Thoreau, who made amazing catalogues of the plants he found in a humble suburban lane, proved for all time that the observations of the worker in humble places are in no wise inferior to those of the man who has a continent to explore. But it is not for the observations they contain that these "Nature-studies" have been printed here. It is for their pure and scholarly style, their value in inculcating a love of Nature and the literature of Nature, and for the ever-discernible evidence of their author having walked through life happy in the possession of the divine consolation of philosophy, that they are deemed of value. Mr. Miller is not a scientist when he deals with Nature; his studies of bird-life are from the pen of a Nature-lover, not an ornithologist. But in this he is happy for many reasons, and for none more than that he at least escapes from being classed in the category of those of whom Ruskin has said, with fine satire, that "in general the scientific natural history of a bird consists of four articles: first, the name and estate of the gentleman whose gamekeeper shot the last that was seen in England; secondly, two or three stories of doubtful origin, printed in every book on the subject of birds for the last fifty years; thirdly, an account of the feathers, from the comb to the rump, with enumeration of the colours which are never more to be seen on the living bird by English eyes; and lastly, a discussion of the reasons why none of the twelve names which former naturalists have given to the bird are of any further use, and why the present author has given it a thirteenth, which is to be universally, and to the end of time, accepted."

In 1887 Mr. Miller founded in Richmond a literary society of which he held the presidency until his retirement from his