Geologist, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. He studied medicine there, at Paris, and at Leyden. In 1754 he devoted himself to agriculture and chemistry in Berwickshire, which led him to mineralogy and geology; in 1768 he moved to Edinburgh. The Huttonian theory, emphasizing the igneous origin of many rocks and deprecating the assumption of causes other than those we see still at work, was expounded in A Theory of the Earth (1795), which forms the basis of modern geology.
James Hutton (3 June 1726 O.S.
Study of rock formations
Educated at the Royal High School, and trained as both a lawyer and medical doctor, Hutton found himself attracted to the nascent science of geology.
At Glen Tilt in the Cairngorm mountains in the Scottish Highlands, Hutton found granite penetrating metamorphic schists, in a way which indicated that the granite had been molten at the time. This showed to him that granite formed from cooling of molten rock, not precipitation out of water as others at the time believed, and that the granite must be younger than the schists. He went on to find a similar penetration of volcanic rock through sedimentary rock near the centre of Edinburgh, at Salisbury Crags, adjoining Arthur's Seat: this is now known as Hutton's Section.
He also noted what became known as "Hutton's Unconformity" in layers of sedimentary rocks at Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast (grid reference NT813710) about midway between Dunbar and Eyemouth, some 30 miles (50 km) east of Edinburgh. Hutton reasoned that there must have been several cycles, each involving deposition on the seabed, uplift with tilting and erosion then undersea again for further layers to be deposited, and there could have been many cycles before over an extremely long history. In 1788, Hutton brought James Hall and John Playfair to see the strata; III, 1805) )
Publication
An abstract of Hutton's Theory was first read at meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 7 March 1785 and 4 April 1785.
Following criticism, especially Richard Kirwan's, who thought him atheist and not logical, among other things, Hutton published a two volume version of his theory in 1795 (Theory of the Earth, Vol. 2), consisting of the 1788 version of his theory (with slight additions) along with a lot of material drawn from shorter papers Hutton already had to hand on various subjects, like as the origin of granite.
Its 2,138 pages made Playfair remark that "The great size of the book, and the obscurity which may justly be objected to many parts of it, have probably prevented it from being received as it deserves."
Opposing theories
His new theories placed him into opposition with the then-popular Neptunist theories of Abraham Gottlob Werner, that all rocks had precipitated out of a single enormous flood. Hutton proposed that the interior of the Earth was hot, and that this heat was the engine which drove the creation of new rock: land was eroded by air and water and deposited as layers in the sea; This theory was dubbed "Plutonist" in contrast to the flood-oriented theory.
As well as combatting the Neptunists, he also opened up the concept of deep time for scientific purposes, in opposition to Catastrophism. Rather than accepting that the earth was no more than a few thousand years old, he maintained that the Earth must be much older (indeed, he went rather overboard and asserted that the Earth was infinitely old). His main line of argument was that the tremendous displacements and changes he was seeing did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that processes still happening on the Earth in the present day had caused them.
Acceptance of geological theories
The prose of Principles of Knowledge was so obscure, in fact, that it also impeded the acceptance of Hutton's geological theories. If anything, Hutton's ideas were eventually accepted too well.
Other contributions
Meteorology
It was not merely the earth to which Hutton directed his attention.
Evolution
Hutton also advocated uniformitarianism for living creatures too – evolution, in a sense – and even suggested natural selection as a possible mechanism affecting them:
"...if an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be the most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race." – Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, volume 2Hutton gave the example that where dogs survived through "swiftness of foot and quickness of sight...
He came to his ideas as the result of experiments in plant and animal breeding, some of which he outlined in an unpublished manuscript, the Elements of Agriculture.
Hutton saw his "principle of variation" as explaining the development of varieties, but rejected the idea of evolution originating species as a "romantic fantasy". Hutton's ideas on geology were clarified in Charles Lyell's books, which Charles Darwin read with enthusiasm during his voyage on the Beagle, and it remained to Darwin to independently develop the idea of natural selection to explain The Origin of Species and bring it to the forefront of public consciousness at the same time as providing the voluminous evidence necessary to win over the scientific community to the theory.
Works
Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge 1794 Theory of the Earth 1795 Elements of Agriculture 1797Cultural reference
The punk rock band Bad Religion quoted his saying "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" on the title song of their 1989 album No Control, but it wasn't inspired by him.
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