James Hutton

Scottish geologist

• Born: June 3, 1726; Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: March 26, 1797; Edinburgh, Scotland

Eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton is remembered as the father of geology for promoting the theory of uniformitarianism and for recognizing the natural processes that create igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. By adding tens of thousands of years onto the six thousand years then believed to represent the age of the Earth, he effectively separated geology from Genesis and proved the Neptunists wrong.

Primary field: Earth sciences

Specialty: Geology

Early Life

James Hutton was the only surviving son of Edinburgh merchant William Hutton and his wife, Sarah Balfour. After his father died when he was three years old, his mother raised him and his three sisters as a single parent; however, the family lived comfortably, and Hutton received a good education. After attending public schools in Edinburgh, he continued his studies in Greek, Latin, mathematics, and other subjects at the University of Edinburgh. Hutton took an interest in chemistry, a field of study that was still in its infancy, and it would be a few more years before Scottish physician William Cullen would teach the first chemistry courses in Scotland. While he studied during his teenage years, Hutton took a job as a law clerk to help support his mother and sisters. However, his employment did not last long. The young Hutton was fired for conducting too many chemistry experiments on “company time.”

Hutton decided to study medicine, completing part of his medical education in Edinburgh before transferring to the University of Paris and finally to the University of Leiden, where he earned his degree in 1749. His dissertation, De sanguine et circulation microcosmi (On the circulation of blood in the microcosm), demonstrated Hutton’s keen interest in medical research and in the mysteries of the human body, but he had little desire to practice medicine. Instead, he collaborated with his schoolmate James Davie to manufacture “sal ammoniac,” more commonly known as ammonium chloride, a chemical they determined could be derived from soot. The business adventure proved quite successful and allowed Hutton to pursue other interests, including agriculture.

Life’s Work

Hutton lived on a farm in England for two years, where he learned and practiced the latest agricultural technologies. He then returned to Berwickshire, Scotland, to settle into the life of a gentleman farmer. While he chose an occupation away from the academic and social centers to which he had earlier gravitated, he took with him a strong intellectual foundation that would provide the framework for his later geological breakthroughs. From his medical background, he had learned about the natural force of circulation in the human body. His interest in chemistry had taught him about chemical reactions and the various elements. Hutton’s college education had included a solid introduction to Newton’s laws of motion. As he plowed the fields and uncovered rocks and fossils, or wandered the countryside discovering unusual geologic formations, he began to think deeply about the natural processes or forces that could have created sandstones and slates, chalks and granites. As he witnessed the erosion of soil, he considered the possibility of how forces might also replenish soil in time.

Hutton began collecting geological specimens as he traveled throughout Great Britain and farther afield, and from scholars throughout Europe. His collection grew into one of the largest known of the eighteenth century, going well beyond a simple pastime. Hutton had become a geologist. In 1767, Hutton left his farm in the hands of a caretaker and moved back to Edinburgh, where he established himself among a group of influential intellectuals, including the philosopher David Hume, physician and chemist Joseph Black, and mathematician John Playfair, key members of the Scottish Enlightenment. The group founded the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783.

With the help of Black, Hutton first presented his theory of uniformitarianism to the Royal Society in 1785. At the heart of his theory was the idea that “deep time” is needed to explain the natural processes and forces that shape the Earth. Hutton theorized that natural processes were cyclical and ongoing. He also put forth the idea that subterranean heat and pressure were responsible for forming certain types of rocks and lifting them above sea level. Hutton’s ideas received a critical reception by the Royal Society, in part because some members were unwilling to adopt a theory that diverted so drastically from the biblical account, and because there was a lack of immediate evidence.

Hutton began to search the Scottish countryside, looking for formations that would help convince people that his theories were valid. In the summer of 1788, he persuaded Playfair and James Hall Nasmyth (inventor of the steam hammer) to accompany him by boat to Siccar Point in southeastern Scotland, where he had discovered a cliff featuring vertical layers of gray rock covered by a horizontal layer of red sandstone. The grey rock is now known as Lower Silurian gray slate, or Silurian greywacke. The red sandstone is called Upper Devonian Old Red Sandstone. At the time, scientists believed all rock was sedimentary. Hutton theorized that the lower gray rock had been uplifted from the ocean floor and tilted by intense heat and pressure. Hutton proposed it was a different kind of rock that was much older than the sandstone.

Hutton revised his paper and published it as the “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe” in the Royal Society’s Transactions. Over the next decade, he revised and expanded his paper into two volumes, publishing them as Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations (1795). Two years later, while working on a third volume, Hutton became seriously ill and died. His magnum opus failed to gain much attention until Playfair rewrote the theory as Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802) and promoted the life of Hutton in a biography published in the Royal Society’s Transactions.

While Hutton is known primarily for his geological discoveries, he also contributed to meteorology, agriculture, and philosophy. He authored several books and papers in these areas, including An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge (1794), and the unpublished “Principles of Agriculture,” which included a section on animal husbandry detailing his own theory of evolution, a theory some scholars believe foreshadows that of English naturalist Charles Darwin.

Impact

Hutton’s theory of uniformitarianism provided the foundation for geology by identifying the principle forces at work in shaping the Earth’s crust and in giving the Earth a much longer geological history than the biblical explanation offered. It also profoundly influenced Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theory of evolution by natural selection. Before Darwin set out on his 1831 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, he was given a copy of the recently published Principles of Geology by the geologist Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875), in which Lyell had credited Hutton for the discovery of uniformitarianism. Darwin was skeptical about uniformitarianism at first, but as he studied the cliffs while sailing past the Canary Islands, South America, and other locations, he came to believe it provided the most logical explanation for their development.

Darwin details his support for uniformitarianism in chapter 9 of the Origin of Species (1859). Earlier, he had acknowledged the moment when the theory first sunk in. He had been walking along the St. Jago (Santiago) coast in the Cape Verde Islands and noticed a white band of fossil shells embedded in the cliff high above the sea. He reasoned that the time needed to produce the fossils and for the land to rise and fall under stress by natural forces would be immeasurable.

Bibliography

Baxter, Stephen. Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time. New York: Doherty, 2003. Print. Presents an overview of Hutton’s life and examines his geological contributions within a broader cultural and scientific perspective. Bibliography, index.

Furniss, Tom. “A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’.” Romanticism 16.3 (Oct. 2010): 305–21. Print. Explores the aesthetics of uniformitarianism and its impact on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other romantic poets, providing a lucid analysis of the scientific theory.

Jutras, Pierre, Grant M. Young, and W. Glen E. Caldwell. “Reinterpretation of James Hutton’s Historic Discovery on the Isle of Arran as a Double Unconformity Masked by a Phreatic Calcrete Hardpan.” Geology 39.2 (Jan. 2011): 147–50. Print. Discusses the confusion over the location of Hutton’s unconformity on the Isle of Aran, where two separate unconformities have now been distinguished. References, colorful illustrations.

Repcheck, Jack. The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003. Print. Provides extensive scientific and cultural background information, as well as more personal details of Hutton’s life. Glossary, bibliography, index.

Zimmer, Carl. The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts, 2010. Print. Details Hutton’s geological discoveries within the context of natural history and cements their role in the theory of evolution. Illustrated, index, bibliography.