Life and Times of James Hutton

The debt which Scotland, and the world with it, owes to the genius of James Hutton cannot easily be measured. His Theory of the Earth, published in two octavo volumes in 1795, has long been universally recognised as one of the great classics of science. Not only did it open up new worlds to research and speculation, but the principles it established revolutionised in course of time the whole trend of scientific thought. When we think, however, of Hutton's amazing achievement—amazing in its originality and its grandeur of conception—it is well to remember not only the profound and far-reaching influence which he exerted, but also the long years of patient observation and sustained reflection which went to the building of his immortal Theory. We should remember not only the Hutton of established and enduring fame, but also the alert and questing spirit who sought so long and so courageously for a key to the mysteries of the earth on which he lived, who dared to look backward into an illimitable past and forward into an incalculable future, and who, on the evidence wrested from the solid rocks, reached the startling and heretical conclusion—as, indeed, in his day it was—that in the operations of nature we find “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”.