Hutton, James

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Hutton, James (1726–97). Geologist. The son of an Edinburgh merchant, Hutton went to his local university where he studied first chemistry, then medicine. From 1754 he took up farming but maintained his scientific interests, being on close terms with Joseph Black. A paper he printed in the transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh foreshadowed his major work, The Theory of the Earth (1795), which laid the foundations of the modern study of geology. Though overladen with quotations, it offered a coherent and plausible account of the evolution of the earth's crust and insisted that the present could be used to explain what had happened in the past. It explained the steady destruction and reformation of rocks, the origin of fossil deposits at the bottom of great oceans, the effect of volcanic action, and offered a new concept of evolutionary time, which ‘is to nature endless’. Of the process of change, he could ‘find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end’.

J. A. Cannon

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