AT JUST THE time that Henry dish was pleting his experiments in London, fourhundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of cluding moment was about to take placewith the death of James Hutton. This was bad news for Hutton, of course, but good news forsce as it cleared the way for a man named John Playfair to rewrite Hutton』s work withoutfear of embarrassment.
Hutton was by all ats a man of the kee insights and liveliest versation, a delightin pany, and without rival when it came to uanding the mysterious slow processesthat shaped the Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form thatanyone could begin to uand. He was, as one biographer observed with an all but audiblesigh, 「almost entirely i of rhetorical aplishments.」 Nearly every line he pennedwas an invitation to slumber. Here he is in his 1795 masterwork, A Theory of the Earth withProofs and Illustrations , discussing . . . something:
The world which we inhabit is posed of the materials, not of the earth whichwas the immediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in asdingfrom the present, we sider as the third, and which had preceded the land thatwas above the surface of the sea, while our present land was yet beh the waterof the o.
Yet almost singlehandedly, and quite brilliantly, he created the sce of geology andtransformed our uanding of the Earth. Hutton was born in 1726 into a prosperousScottish family, and ehe sort of material fort that allowed him to pass much of hislife in a genially expansive round of light work and intellectual betterment. He studiedmedie, but found it not to his liking and turned i, which he followed in arelaxed and stific way on the family estate in Berwickshire. Tiring of field and flock, in1768 he moved to Edinburgh, where he founded a successful business produg salammonia coal soot, and busied himself with various stific pursuits. Edinburgh atthat time was a ter of intellectual vigor, and Hutton luxuriated in its enrig possibilities.
He became a leading member of a society called the Oyster Club, where he passed hisevenings in the pany of men such as the eist Adam Smith, the chemist JosephBlack, and the philosopher David Hume, as well as such occasional visiting sparks asBenjamin Franklin and James Watt.
Iradition of the day, Hutton took an i in nearly everything, from mineralogy tometaphysics. He ducted experiments with chemicals, iigated methods of iningand al building, toured salt mines, speculated on the meisms of heredity, collectedfossils, and propouheories on rain, the position of air, and the laws of motion,among much else. But his particular i was geology.
Among the questions that attracted i in that fanatically inquisitive age was ohathad puzzled people for a very long time—namely, why a clamshells and other marinefossils were so often found on mountaintops. How oh did they get there? Those whothought they had a solution fell into two opposing camps. One group, known as theunists, was vihat everything oh, including seashells in improbably loftyplaces, could be explained by rising and falling sea levels. They believed that mountains,hills, and other features were as old as the Earth itself, and were ged only when watersloshed over them during periods of global flooding.
Opposing them were the Plutonists, who hat voloes ahquakes, amongother enlivening agents, tinually ged the face of the pla but clearly owed nothing towayward seas. The Plutonists also ra