There are some mysterious errors when trying to install miscellaneous package from octave-forge:
error: variable length array of non-POD element type 'Array<octave_idx_type>'
etc. This happens to homebrew-ed octave 3.6.4.
The issue seems to have something to do with clang, the default compiler homebrew uses to install octave. The solution for now is to use gcc instead:
$ export CXX=llvm-g++-4.2
$ octave
octave> pkg install -forge miscellaneous