award- winning author of Evolution

ages in, chaos

"This book, then, is thertory of how a farmer's son
from Scotland learned to peer into the deepest
abysses of time. It is a drama of personality, land­
scape, and ideas, of an intellectual revolution that
shaped our world-and of a man whose vision,
rooted in antiquity yet tinged with modern philoso­
phies, was not only ahead of his own time but speaks
toournewcentury."-FROM THE FOREWORD

following Bishop h s <^ireiul bibli 1 o.

tions, was that the Earth was just six th • - • 1
years old. James Hutton, a gentleman farmer •, th
i passion for rocks, knew that could not be die
case. Looking at the formation of irregular strata
m the layers of the Earth, he boldly deduced that
a much longer span of time would be required for
the landscape he saw to have evolved. In the lusty
and turbulent world of Enlightenment Scotland,
tie set out to prove it.

tie could not have achieve^ this goal without the

help of his friends. Huttons entourage in
Edinburgh would turn out to be the leading
thinkers of the age, including Erasmus Darwin,
Adarn Smith, James Watt, David ;ume, and
Joseph Black. But Hutton had his enemies, too.
His geological theory wo Ud ignite profound re i
gious debate and was condemned as ‘a wild and
unnatural notion” that would lead to “skepticism,
and at last to downright infidelity and atheism.”

Ultimately, however, hra was o» e of the

most extraordinary and essential moments in sci­
entific history. Huttons disyovary of deep ti>- e
changed our view of humarfity solace in the uni­
verse forever.

Like Dava Sobel’s best* llmg kohgitude, Ages in

Chaos vividly captures a rapXcenc|ent moment in
the history of human accomplishment.
Ages in Chaos
 Also from Tom Doherty Associates

The Light of Other Days (with Arthur C. Clarke)

Ages in Chaos
James Hutton and the
Discovery of Deep Time

Stephen Baxter

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

New York
AGES IN CHAOS: JAMES HUTTON AND THE DISCOVERY OF DEEP
TIME

Copyright © 2003 by Stephen Baxter

Originally published in 2003 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Great Britain,

under the title Revolutions in the Earth.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book,

or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-765-31238-7
EAN 978-0765-31238-9

First Forge Edition: November 2004

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321
To my mother
 CONTENTS

Prologue i

part one: Deposition 9

1. 'They make a desert, and they call it peace' 11
2. 'The first day of the creation is deduced' 17
3. 'A mind formed for different pursuits' 24
4. 'Every man was a soldier' 32
5. 'The Earth's blood is the veins of its waters' 40
6. 'Upon this chaos rode the distressed ark' 47
7. 'The wandering infidelities of the heart' 57
8. 'A cursed country where one has to shape everything
out of a block' 65
9. 'The Work of Infinite Power and Wisdom' 74

part two: Consolidation 83

10. 'Assemblies of good fellows' 85
11. 'The power of heat is unlimited' 99
12. 'Lord pity the arse that's clagged to a head that
will hunt stones' 108
13. 'Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion' 118
14. 'We have now got to the end of our reasoning' 130
15. 'The world was tired out with geological theories' 146
16. 'A wild and unnatural notion' 162
17. 'An abyss from which human reason recoils' 170
18. 'A passage from one condition of thought to another' 177

part three: Uplift 187

19. 'I could see the marks of his hammer' 189
20. 'It altered the tone of one's mind' 204
21. 'The bold outline traced with so masterly a hand' 214

Epilogue 222

Acknowledgements 232
Further Reading 233
Index 238
Frontispiece: Portrait of James Hutton by Sir Henry Raeburn,
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Siccar Point: Author's photograph

 PROLOGUE

On a bright summer day in 1788, James Hutton and two close

friends took a boat trip to Siccar Point, a sea cliff on Scotland's
eastern coast. Their purpose was geological investigation.
In April 2002 I made my own pilgrimage to Siccar Point. My
wife and I had hired a cottage on the outskirts of Dunbar, some
thirty kilometres east of Edinburgh. Now we drove east along
the Ai, the trunk road that leads to Berwick and England,
turning off along an A-road that hugs the shoreline.
This north Berwickshire coast is spectacular. A glance
offshore reveals the uncompromising plug that is Bass Rock,
the core of an ancient volcano. More plugs protrude from the
ground in a great line that marches to the west through
Edinburgh and beyond. It is a stitching of volcanism that marks
the place where Scotland collided with England during the
building of a supercontinent, hundreds of millions of years ago.
If the rocks show a turbulent geological history, then the
battered castles of the area betray much human turmoil. Today
Scotland is at peace, the castles monuments for tourists taking
time out from the golf courses. You can take a boat trip around
Bass Rock. Its upper surface is made white by the bodies of sea
birds, puffins and gulls and eider ducks and gannets, a hundred
thousand of them.
We took a couple of turns along minor roads, passing the
ruins of a Saxon church. We came to a factory nestling in an
old quarry, where we parked the car. We scrambled up to the
cliff top. The land was green and tumbled, littered with yellow
gorse and dry stone walls. The cliffs were steep, the rocks
distorted, their geology complex even at first glance. Cutting
across cattle fields, we walked east beyond the Point itself,
until we could get a good view back. We saw beaches of rock
and sand, and the grey-blue bulk of Torness. The nuclear power
station dominates the scenery in our era, but the geology is still
there.
The beauty of the Point is that here the sea has worn away
the land's green cover, exposing the rocks beneath. You can
2 AGES IN CHAOS

easily see a contact between two types of rock: red sandstone

strata overlie darker and older 'greywacke' (a hard grey sedimen­
tary rock). The red sandstone is pretty much horizontal, but the
underlying greywacke strata are tilted up, in places almost
vertically, and they stick through the overlaid sandstone like
broken teeth.
It was this exposure that Hutton had come looking for. He
believed that the subtle features of this 'unconformity' were
proof of the extraordinary idea that had obsessed him for nearly
thirty years: that the Earth was not a mere few thousand years
old, as Biblical scholars insisted, but vastly ancient, and that
every particle of its surface had undergone countless cycles of
erosion and uplift.
Standing on that windswept cliff top, we tried to imagine
how James Hutton and his friends came upon this place, more
than two centuries ago. Hutton was already sixty-two. His
companions that day - the chemist Sir James Hall and
mathematician John Playfair, both much younger, like Hutton
both Edinburgh gentlemen - scrambled clumsily but gamely after
Hutton onto the shore. They listened loyally as Hutton, intense
and verbose, lectured them about the features of the Point.
We must read the rocks, said Hutton, who had taught
himself how.
Strata of sedimentary rocks are laid down in oceans, and
they are always formed horizontally. They are the products of
erosion, the everyday wearing away of rock by air or water, the
removal of just a grain at a time, washed down from the land
to the sea floor. Just a grain at a time - but given enough time,
that ceaseless chiselling forms great layers of sea-bottom debris,
which are consolidated by heat and pressure and chemical
cementing into rock.
Sometimes such deposits can be formed, metre after metre,
year after year, with no significant change. On the coasts of
southern England there are chalk beds hundreds of metres
thick, laid down out of a sea that was warm when dinosaurs
chased across the land. More usually the process of formation
of sedimentary rocks is interrupted. These events may be
subtle, just slight changes in environmental conditions which
give rise to 'bedding planes', as the geologists say, the markers
that delineate for us the rocks' familiar layers of strata.
 PROLOGUE 3
The breaks may be more spectacular, however. Great forces
within the Earth can distort the neat layers. The strata can be
lifted or lowered, tilted up or down, broken and folded over,
solid rock moulded like putty. And when the rocks have been
lifted away from their formative sea beds and into the air, they
are immediately subject to the same relentless forces of erosion
which led to their creation in the first place - and somewhere
new strata are laid down from the debris.
It is this combination of distortion, erosion and fresh deposi­
tion that can give rise to the geological record's most spectacular
discontinuities of all: the unconformities. An unconformity is a
great gap in time, where rocks separated by millions of years are
jammed into contact.
This is what Hutton recognised at Siccar Point, the daddy of
all British unconformities. After the formation of these
greywacke strata - so Hutton explained - geological violence
followed. The land here was crumpled and raised up: the
greywacke strata were broken and tilted, and became part of a
great mountain range, called the Caledonian. (We know now
that this was a side effect of Scotland's collision with England.
When continents collide mountains are formed, just as the
Himalayas today are the result of the driving of India into
Asia.) Immediately erosion began its relentless work. Again, of
course, the erosion was slow, just a grain at a time, almost
imperceptible to our eyes, or even over a human lifetime. But
given enough time the mountains were worn to nubs, and
where they were exposed to the air the tilted greywacke strata
were sliced through, as neatly as if a white-hot wire had been
passed through ice cream. You can see such levelling all along
the Berwickshire beaches close to Siccar. All it took was time.
Still the geological processing continued. Next, in a new
tectonic spasm, this levelled beach was lowered beneath a new
ocean - or perhaps the ocean rose to cover it. Debris washed
from the dry land began to settle on the submerged surface -
again, just a grain at a time, but after enough time more flat
strata formed, laid down over the sliced-off edges of the older
rocks.
Thus the Siccar Point unconformity was formed, a junction
between rocks separated in their creation by eighty million
years. Erosion, deposition, consolidation, uplift, over and over
4 AGES IN CHAOS

again, each new landscape laid down on the ruin of the old: the
Point's jumbled strata are nothing less than the wreckage of
worlds - and a record of their creation and destruction.
Previous generations had imagined that it had taken cata­
clysmic, probably divine, interventions to create such
spectacular formations: Noah's Flood, for example. Hutton's
genius was to recognise that it was not a miracle that was
required, that the processes of erosion and uplift that we see at
work around us today are sufficient to explain everything in
the rocks - sufficient, if they are given long enough.
Hutton replaced the hand of God with the great pressure of
time, long aeons of it. And deep geological time is Hutton's
wonderful and terrible legacy, to us and every generation to
come.

You can see how Hutton looked in Sir Henry Raeburn's portrait
of him (see Frontispiece). The picture hangs in the Scottish
National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, in the section marked
'In the Age of Burns and Scott'. Hutton is sitting in his study,
surrounded by the insignia of his interests: the manuscript of
his great book Theory of the Earth, a quill pen - and a few rocks,
just small samples, some of the precious 'hand specimens' he
used to make his geological points, such as a bit of chalk bearing
the impression of a fossil sea shell.
The picture is an early Raeburn and not a great one. Though
Hutton seems informal, with the lower buttons of his brown
waistcoat undone, he looks uncomfortable, with his legs
crossed, one arm draped over the back of his chair, and his
hands clasped together. He has a thin face with a prominent
nose and a weak chin, and wisps of grey hair surround his bald
scalp. He is looking away from the viewer, as if nervously. He
was painted when aged about sixty. For a science buff like me
it is good to see a geologist so honoured in a hall named after
poets, even if his portrait is overwhelmed by the huge marble
statue of his friend James Watt in the Gallery's Great Hall. But
for a great man of Edinburgh's Enlightenment Hutton looks
oddly vulnerable: perhaps he was a man of contrasts, as most
of us are.
I first became interested in Hutton when I visited Edinburgh
in 1997, to research a science fiction novel I planned to set
 PROLOGUE 5
there (a geology-based disaster story in which I took gleeful
pleasure in destroying Torness). Much of Edinburgh's beauty
comes from its geological setting. Edinburgh's castle is built on
top of one of those supercontinental volcanic plugs - the
stones are laid directly onto the basalt, like a fantasy palace
from Peake or Tolkien. Tens of thousands of years ago an ice
sheet moved east over the site of Edinburgh, a monstrous slab
so thick that even Arthur's Seat was a small obstacle in its
path. But the irreducibly stubborn volcanic cores gave some
shelter to the softer rocks around them, and in the lee of the
plugs great tails of rock remained, like shadows. The spine of
Castle Hill's glacial tail has been built over, to become the
High Street and Canongate, today cluttered with tourist-trap
shops.
In Edinburgh, you are surrounded by time, deep time frozen
in the rocks on which the city has been heaped. Compared to
such antiquity, human time is fleeting.
We struggle to map our own lives, marking unravelling years
with birthdays and anniversaries, grasping at fading memories
with mementos and photographs, with gravestone epitaphs and
monuments and Internet genealogies. But a human lifespan is
brief indeed. Over longer timescales, nothing is constant. James
Hutton was born nearly three centuries ago. Over such intervals
even languages evolve: basic vocabularies change by around
twenty per cent over a thousand years. Hutton's own letters
take some decoding today. We can still read Shakespeare, but
need notes to help figure out some of his archaisms. Many of
us might struggle through Chaucer, but Beowulf is beyond any­
one but the experts. Nations change too, of course. When
Hutton was born, there was no United States: much of North
America was still a British colony. Still, some nations have
survived to the present from Hutton's time - Britain itself, for
example.
Look back only a little deeper, say to a thousand years, and
pre-Conquest British history dissolves into turbulence and mist.
Virtually no political institutions survive over a millennium,
though religious organisations persist, such as the Catholic
Church. A thousand years ago most Europeans scratched out
lives in crude villages,- the advanced cultures of the world were
in the east - the Arabs, the Chinese.
6 AGES IN CHAOS

Add another zero, look back tens of thousands of years, and

you have already reached the limits of humanity. Ice Age cave
paintings speak to us from a time before anything like modern
civilisation had been born, but we will probably never under­
stand their message. It may be that modern humanity itself is
not much older than the earliest of our artworks.
But a few tens of millennia, the age of humanity itself, are only
the surface of the great ocean of past time. The first recognisable
hominid tools - bits of chipped stone - are around a hundred
times older than the first cave paintings. Go back that far and the
ancestors of humanity were like upright chimps. Another factor
of ten, and there were no apes at all. The most advanced primates
were the size of rats or squirrels - but they survived the impact
of a comet upon the Earth, a trauma whose scars can still be
seen in the rocks, in a layer of compacted ash and dust.
Even the monstrous interval since the death of the dinosaurs
is only a little more than a hundredth of the true age of the
Earth. The layers of rocks beneath the comet ash tell the story
of aeons of chthonic churning, a great mindless time that
preceded the arrival of anything even remotely like ourselves
on the planet.
And, given enough time, even the land changes. 'The
shepherd', Hutton wrote, 'thinks the mountain, on which he
feeds his flock, to have always been there.' But look into time's
deepest abyss and even rock flows like water, mountains billow
like clouds, and continents spin in a basalt sea.
This is our modern view of time. The late Stephen Jay Gould
called it 'geology's most frightening fact', because 'if humanity
arose just yesterday as a small branch on a flourishing tree,
then life may not in a genuine sense exist for us or because of
us. Perhaps we are only an afterthought, a kind of cosmic
accident ...'
We didn't always think this way.
When James Hutton was born, in the first half of the
eighteenth century, most educated westerners thought the
world was just six thousand years old, as computed according
to the Bible's chronology. Six thousand years: just a few
hundred human generations, a planet not much older than the
pyramids. It was a comforting vision of a young Earth ruled by
mankind since its origin.
 PROLOGUE 7
The brevity of time was one of three struts that reassured
mankind of our special nature: our world was at the centre of
the universe, the world had been created by God for the
purpose of supporting us, and the universe was only a little
older than we were - in fact only days older. Today all the legs
of that great tripod of certainty have been knocked away.
Copernicus showed that the Earth, far from being the centre of
things, is just a mote adrift in a great sea of darkness. Darwin
would show that we are not a divine creation but the product
of selection and adaptation: slow, orderly but mindless pro­
cesses. And James Hutton proved that the Earth is not as
young as mankind, but vastly older. As early as 1788, this
Scottish amateur scientist perceived revolutions in the Earth,
and declared that the geological record revealed 'no vestige of
a beginning, no prospect of an end'.
The demonstration that we are as lost in time as in
Copernicus' space has surely been the most extraordinary
upheaval of all in modern human thinking - as well as the
most essential, for without it the work of Darwin would have
had no context; there would have been no time for evolution
to do its work. But today hardly anyone knows Hutton's name.
Who was Hutton? How could a gentleman scientist­
philosopher of the late eighteenth century, without even a
formal academic post, come up with such a startling and
modern view of the Earth?
The received view of Hutton, I found, was unsatisfactory.
Donald McIntyre and Alan McKirdy published a brief popular
biography of Hutton in 1997. This engaging book, full of pictures,
describes the geology well - but Hutton, bachelor scholar in
Enlightenment Edinburgh, sounds like an ascetic paragon of
scientific virtue. The Encyclopaedia Britannica sketches a
modern-sounding observational scientist who studied the rocks,
and thereby showed that the world's geological phenomena could
be explained by processes we can see today: 'From that time
on, geology became a science ... No biblical explanations were
necessary.' In such accounts Hutton sounds like nothing so
much as a time-travelling twenty-first-century geologist, some­
how dropped three centuries into the past to do heroic battle
with bad guys armed with dogmatic theology.
This can't be true. Even the word 'geology' wasn't commonly
8 AGES IN CHAOS

used until after Hutton's death. I wanted to know how Hutton's

great insights had come about, and how Hutton's ideas have
been taken up and developed in the two centuries of geologising
since his death, to become incorporated into our modern view
of the world: I wanted to know the biography of the ideas, as
well as of the man.
As I began to research more deeply, into academic works on
Hutton and the (scarce) source material, at last I began to get a
sense of the real Hutton. He was, of course, a man with a
complicated personal life. He was deeply embedded, as we all
are, in the culture and the great events of his time - the
eighteenth century was an alien environment compared to our
modern world. He was most resolutely not a modern scientist,
in the sense we understand it now. But I saw that, remarkably,
much of what shaped Hutton still attracts our thinking today.
This book, then, is the story of how a farmer's son from
Scotland learned to peer into the deepest abysses of time. It is
a drama of personality, landscape and ideas, of an intellectual
revolution that shaped our world - and of a man whose vision,
rooted in antiquity yet tinged with modern philosophies, was
not only ahead of his own time but speaks to our new century.

At Siccar Point, Hutton peered into his friends' faces, earnestly

seeking understanding. Gradually Hall and Playfair learned
to see the deep history the rocks' formation implied. 'On us
who saw these phenomena for the first time,' Playfair would
write, 'the impression made will not easily be forgotten ... The
mind seemed to grow giddy looking so far into the abyss of
time.'
But Hutton, the man who saw eternity, had less than a
decade left to live - and soon his most formidable opponent,
Irish chemist Richard Kirwan, would launch a vitriolic attack
against the vision that had shaped Hutton's life.

Stephen Baxter, June 2.002.

 ONE

Deposition
 I
'They make a desert, and
they call it peace7
James Hutton was born in Edinburgh on 3 June 1726. He came
into the world nine months before the death of Isaac Newton.
He had three sisters, Isabella, Jean and Sarah, and an older
brother who died when Hutton was very young. His father
William Hutton was a merchant, prominent enough in
Edinburgh circles to hold the office of City Treasurer for some
years. John Playfair (Hutton's companion at Siccar Point, who
would one day write Hutton's first biography) described William
as 'a man highly respected for his good sense and integrity'.
William's wife, Sarah, was a merchant's daughter.
Scotland's capital at this time was a city of some thirty
thousand souls. It had yet to see the grand Georgian develop­
ment of the second half of the eighteenth century, and it
retained much of the character of medieval times. The Royal
Mile - the avenue that still stretches from the castle down the
rocky shadow of the glaciers - was universally admired as a
beautiful fairway. The line of roofs that stretched from the
castle to Holyrood Palace was punctuated by the steeple of the
cathedral of St Giles, Parliament House, church spires, and the
walls of a prison and university. But the unplanned clutter
around the Mile was less revered: tenement blocks rose nine or
ten storeys from the streets below, all in a cloud of smoke. The
English chaplain of a Scottish regiment would compare the
city to 'an ivory comb, whose teeth on both sides are very foul,
though the space between them is clean and sightly'.
In the home of a middle-class merchant like William Hutton
there would have been a dining room and a drawing room, cup­
boards of carved wood, panelled walls, upholstery of silk and
scarlet leather, carpets and rugs, and stands of books. The
Huttons were a conventionally Christian family, pious in their
domestic way,- they attended the kirk, and the children were
encouraged to pray daily.
12 AGES IN CHAOS

The family's deeper roots were probably southern. Hutton is

a Yorkshire name, coming from an Old English word meaning,
appropriately enough, 'settlement on a bluff'. But the Huttons
spoke Scots. More than a dialect, Scots shared its origins with
English in old Anglo-Saxon, but the two languages had diverged
widely: Scots had been leavened with words from Scandinavian,
French and Gaelic. The language had produced a rich literary
heritage in the Middle Ages, and in Edinburgh, Glasgow and
Aberdeen it had become the language of the Kirk, law and
commerce.
However, an Act of the Parliaments passed only nineteen years
before Hutton was born had united Scotland with England.
Suddenly English was the language of letters and polite society.
Learning English was as difficult as learning any new language:
you had to remember to say 'old' instead of 'auld', 'a lot' instead
of 'a muckle'. Scots was made to seem second-class.
The Scottish people did not bow down to English cultural
imperialism. Scots continued to be spoken in the courts and
the pulpits, and Robert Burns would be effectively bilingual,
capable of composing verse in Scots as well as in English. Hutton
himself would remain a steadfast Scots speaker throughout his
life.
Scotland was proud, then - but in 1726 it was a backward
nation. The highways were so poor that men and women alike
would ride horses rather than suffer the discomfort of a coach.
The fine natural harbours were underdeveloped, and in the
economic shadow of England there was scarcely any shipping
anyhow. The towns, including Edinburgh, still stank of poor
sanitation and overcrowding, and were incubators of disease.
There was poverty and hunger: the population had long out­
grown the ability of the primitive farming methods of the time
to feed it.
And it is remarkable to recall that even at this time, not very
far to the north of Hutton's home in Edinburgh, a very differ­
ent way of life persisted, and a language was spoken that was
much older than either English or Scots. Like all of us, Hutton
had been born on the transient surface of deep history.

Scotland first emerged into the light of history nearly two

millennia before Hutton was born.
 DEPOSITION 13
In the first century ad the Romans fought a great battle in
the north-east of the country, against people described by the
historian Tacitus as tall and red-haired. These Picts - after the
Latin picti, for 'painted one', perhaps a soldier's nickname -
were the product of some three millennia of previous waves of
immigrants: flint-chippers from Ireland, England and Norway,
Neolithic farmers from the Mediterranean, iron-users from
across the North Sea. The bronze-working 'Beaker Folk' left a
legacy of spectacular stone circles. The first named inhabitant
of Scotland was Calgacus, the Swordsman, slaughtered in
Tacitus' battle, and his angry defiance of the mighty Romans
would characterise the Scottish history to follow: 'They make
a desert, and they call it peace!' In the Picts' unmapped
wilderness of mountains, bogs and forests, the Romans lost
legions.
By the fifth century Rome was dying. In the turmoil that
followed, more invaders came to Scotland, and there were
endless wars between Picts, Teutonic-speaking Angles from
across the North Sea, the Britons under their resolute kings
(one of whom may have been Arthur) - and a wandering people
from Ireland: they called themselves Gael, but the Romans
had called them Scoti, 'bandits'. By the ninth century the Scots
were overwhelming the Picts, who would be largely erased from
history. The Scots established their seat of power at Scone,
where kings were crowned over a slab of stone said to have
been brought from the Irish homeland (though the geologists,
prosaically, say it is local sandstone).
In their harsh land of granite and moor, the lives of the people
were hard. To the perils of drought, flood and Norse raids was
added the bloody froth of the endless battles of succession
among the various kings and pretenders. One of them was
Macbeth of Moray - in real life, evidently, a good ruler who
may have made a pilgrimage to Rome.
In 1072 the Normans, fresh from their defeat of the English,
mounted the most decisive invasion Scotland had seen since
the retreat of the legions. Scotland itself became a^Norman
feudal kingdom, a great hierarchy of vassals and possession
with everything ultimately owned by the king, who in turn
was the vassal of God. The old Celtic tribal society neverthe­
less survived in the Highlands, mutating slowly into the clan
U AGES IN CHAOS

system. The clan was seen as .a kind of extended family, its

people the 'children' of the chief, the head of the family. The
Highlanders remained a warrior people, and among the clans
there would be a long history of feuds, battle and treachery,-
there was little to unite them but their contempt of the
Lowlanders, the Gall. It was a system that would, remarkably,
persist until the eighteenth century, the age of Rob Roy, the
Bonnie Prince, and James Hutton himself.
The economy slowly became mercantile and agricultural,
but much of the country remained wild. A great forest blanketed
the Stirling plain as far as West Lothian, and wild animals far
outnumbered people - there were wolves, boar, herds of wild
cattle and deer. The Scottish monarchy remained weak, plagued
by battles over succession, and there were inconclusive wars
with the English. The great events of Europe's Renaissance
touched Scotland comparatively little: in an age of more weak
kings, more inconclusive conflicts with the English, fratricidal
bloodshed among the clans and banditry among the barons,
money was spent on weapons and walls rather than patronising
the arts.
In the sixteenth century Henry VIII's reign in England brought
a breach with the Church of Rome. John Knox, a colourful and
ferocious figure whose soul had been hardened by time spent
at the oars of a French penal galley, provided Scotland's own
Reformation with a focus. The Kirk of Scotland cut its ties to
Rome, proclaiming that its General Assembly was above
Parliament in authority. Even the young queen, Mary Queen of
Scots, had to endure repeated confrontations with Knox over
limits to her power.
For the ordinary people the Kirk's dogmatic severity, enforced
by punishment and humiliation, was unwelcome. Old rituals,
like summer plays in honour of Robin Hood, were condemned.
Even dancing and drama were viewed with suspicion. Still, to
visitors the people remained hospitable, with a capacity for
drink in excess of that of any English, despite the Kirk's
strictures. And Knox bequeathed a unique vision of political
power. He believed that power was ordained by God - but it
was vested in the people, not in the person of a monarch. The
Kirk was hardly a proponent of modern democracy, but at the
time its argument for a power vested in the common folk had
 DEPOSITION 15
no counterpart anywhere else in Europe. James Hutton would
benefit from the Kirk's deep commitment to education.

Hutton's father died when James was three years old.

William's legacy seems to have left his family well provided
for - he would even leave Hutton property, in the shape of two
small farms in Berwickshire. After William's death his widow
Sarah, with admirable strength of character, coped well;
Playfair said she 'appears to have been well qualified for this
double portion of parental duty'. Sarah resolved to bestow on
Hutton a 'liberal education'. So Hutton was sent to the High
School of Edinburgh.
Founded during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, the school
had been built from the rubble of a Blackfriars monastery,
itself founded in 1230, and destroyed in 15 58 by a Reformation
mob. The monasteries had long served as seats of learning, and
in 1566 it was resolved to build the High School on the site. The
building was completed in 1578. By Hutton's day it was old
and crowded. (It would be demolished in 1774 and replaced by
a new building, which today houses the archaeology department
of the University of Edinburgh.)
For its time, the High School was a good school. As early as
1560 John Knox had called for a national system of education,
and the first parliamentary act to that effect was passed eighty
years later. By Hutton's time nearly every parish had a school
of some sort. In some places the education was no doubt rudi­
mentary, but it was there, and it was free, at least in theory. By
the time of Hutton's birth the literacy rate among Scottish
males was more than half, and by 1750 virtually every town
had a library.
The Kirk's motive for this educational drive was ideological:
only literate children could read Holy Scripture. But a literate
reader could not be confined to the Bible. The brilliant Scottish
Enlightenment of the second half of the century would be
nourished by the minds of an educated populace,- David Hume
and Adam Smith wrote not just for an intellectual elite but a
genuine reading public.
What kind of child was Hutton? The biographical sources
are very thin. We can infer from his later career that he was
sociable and clever, and that he possessed a lively but restless
16 AGES IN CHAOS

and undisciplined mind. He probably had a’distaste for protocol

and authority. Much later,in 1774, he would write to his friend
James Watt, developer of steam-engine technology: 'Your friends
are trying to do something for you ... Every application for
public employment ... requires nothing but a passage thro' the
proper channels ... the honestest endeavour must to succeed
put on the face of roguery ... come & lick some great man's
arse and be damn'd to you.' At Edinburgh High School, the
schoolboy Hutton must have been a handful for his masters.
And it would be delicious to know how old Hutton was
when he first questioned the belief, held by most educated
people, that the Earth was a mere six thousand years old.
 2
'The first day of the
creation is deduced'
James Ussher was an Irish bishop who had been chaplain to an
executed king. He died in 1656 in England, far from home and
all but bankrupt. But despite his troubles he completed his
life's work, a mighty history of the Earth itself, called The
Annals of the World.
Nobody today reads the Annals' densely argued Latin, spread
across two thousand pages. But many people still know the
Annals through one clear and unambiguous date and time: 22
October 4004, bc, a Saturday, about six in the evening. For this
- so Ussher had calculated - was when God had created the
universe, and history began. On that fateful Saturday after­
noon, there was no four o'clock or five o'clock: it wasn't just
that planet Earth didn't yet exist at those times, but those
mundane instants themselves, hours now used for soccer­
playing or tea-making or car-washing, never occurred at all.
For its precision and for the weight of scholarship that lay
behind it, Ussher's date became imprinted in the mass con­
sciousness for two centuries or more. In the early nineteenth
century even Charles Darwin would graduate from Cambridge
University believing that the world was six thousand years
old, give or take.
But Ussher's intense and obsessive project seems very odd to
the eyes of a modern scientist. After all he had deduced the age
of the Earth without looking at a scrap of physical evidence -
not a single rock.

James Ussher had been born in Dublin in 1581-into a

Protestant family. Quiet and bookish, he was imrfiersed in
religion from birth. His uncle was the Archdeacon of Dublin,
and Ussher learned to read the Bible with the aid of two blind
aunts who had memorised much of its contents.
The times were turbulent. Ireland had long been a complex
i8 AGES IN CHAOS

web of Anglo-Norman fiefdoms and Irish' kingdoms. During

Ussher's lifetime Elizabeth I passed the Acts of Supremacy and
Uniformity, imposing the Anglican Church settlement on
Ireland. Her reward was three serious rebellions. The laßt
rising, supported by the Pope and by Philip III of Spain, erupted
in Ulster during Ussher's teenage years. Its suppression was a
bloody business: English chroniclers spoke of the starving Irish
creeping back from the forests where they had been driven,
their mouths stained green by grass and nettles. From now on
Ireland would be run almost exclusively by Englishmen, and
Dublin was like a garrison city.
Against this background, young Ussher progressed with his
studies. He was taught Latin at a school in Dublin run by two
Scotsmen as a cover for their work as spies for the Scottish
king James VI. By the age of ten Ussher had already become
deeply pious, and soon after that fascinated by history - and by
fifteen he had already made his first attempt to map out a
chronology of the Bible.
At the age of twenty-one Ussher was ordained a priest. He
would face a lifelong struggle against the Catholicism of the
mass of the Irish people. Gradually Ussher came to see that he
could use his Biblical scholarship, on the issue of the dates and
wider matters, to support his Protestant faith. His intellectual
reputation developed quickly. By twenty-four he was made
Archbishop of Armagh; later he became Primate of All Ireland.
Cushioned by wealth and position, Ussher settled down at the
bishop's palace in Drogheda to work on his mighty history of
the world.

The notion that the world might have a beginning at all is

actually a legacy of Christianity. Most ancient civilisations had
viewed the universe as eternal. Time was cyclical, with events
repeating over and again - like the beating of a heart, the waxing
and waning of the Moon, the cycling of the seasons. The
Babylonians developed a cosmic model based on periodicities of
the planets in which each Great Year lasts 424,000 years,- in the
'summer', when all the planets congregate in the constellation
Cancer, there is a great fire, and the 'winter', marked by a
gathering in Capricorn, is greeted by a great flood.
Some thinkers had developed this notion to its extreme.
 DEPOSITION 19
Perhaps, the Greek Stoics had argued, events repeat exactly from
one cycle to the next. In a universe governed by palingenesia you
have read these words an uncounted number of times before and
are doomed to read them again, over and over, in future cycles.
Aristotle was troubled by this notion. There would be problems
with causality, he pointed out, if he found himself living as
much before the fall of Troy as after it.
In cyclical universes it was impossible even to frame the
question of an age of the Earth - for it hadn't had a beginning;
there were only the mighty cycles, Great Years receding into
past and future, beyond the reach of imagination.
There was one culture which eschewed the notion of a
cycling eternity. In the Judaic tradition the history of the world
was a narrative: a simple story, with a beginning, middle and
end, spanning time from God's creation of the world on the
first day all the way to the end of things. With the emergence
of Christianity this story was elaborated further, with detailed
revelations of what would come at the end of time, and with
Christ's biography as a unique pivot.
St Augustine completed this great time-mapping project,
arguing powerfully against the notions of cycling time. If life
was doomed to follow patterns set in an earlier age, there
would be no motivation to follow the teachings of Christ:
what would be the point of trying to lead a better life, if every
action you took was fixed before you were even born? And
besides, cycles in time would violate one of Christianity's key
precepts, that the Incarnation of Christ was a unique event.
'God forbid that we should believe in [the Eternal Return],'
Augustine wrote. 'For Christ died once for our sins, and rising
again, dies no more.' There were no previous cycles, then.
Time was created with the world - which itself was born just
before humanity - and would end with it. Augustine's faith
surely consoled him in a difficult age. He had been born at a
time when the Pax Romana seemed inviolable; he died with
his city, Hippo in Africa, under siege by the Vandals. -
Augustine's pronouncements on Earth's history froze ideas
of time in western human minds for thirteen hundred years.
The idea of cycles in time, and of a deep ancient history
preceding humanity, faded from view, save as a half-remembered
pagan notion. Earth's youth became powerfully lodged as
20 AGES IN CHAOS

essential to the faith, a doctrine it would be heretical to deny.

And remarkably, exactly how old Earth was could be worked
out from a careful reading of scripture. The Book of Genesis
contained a genealogy of Adam and his descendants through
twenty-one generations, and the Bible's family histories con­
tinued through to dates anchored in recorded history, like the
destruction of Jerusalem's temple by the Persians. So in principle,
as the young Ussher understood, to get a date of divine
reliability for the beginning of time, all you had to do was to
search through the Bible for the relevant generations and add
them all up.

Ussher's early adolescent experiments quickly taught him that

in practice this was tricky. Scholars had actually been trying to
construct Biblical chronologies since Roman times. While
these computations all gave results of the same order of
magnitude - a few thousand years - they differed unfortunately
widely, ranging from less than six thousand years to nearly
nine thousand. To get to the 'true' answer was going to require
some careful scholarship.
As a firm basis for his work, Ussher sought out the most
authoritative version of the Bible. All editions of the Bible had
been copied and translated from earlier versions, and Ussher
understood that the older the copy, the less likely it was to be
corrupted by translation and other errors, or even deliberate
falsifications. He employed an agent to seek out rare manu­
scripts in the Middle East, and went so far as to learn the
ancient languages of Samaritan and Chaldean when scraps of
Biblical scripture turned up in those languages. He already
knew Hebrew.
Meanwhile, Ussher tried to link the Bible's chronology to
known dates in history. He was greatly helped by the ancient
chroniclers' habit of referring to astronomical events. The
motions of the stars, planets, Moon and sun are perfect time­
keepers: events like solar and lunar eclipses are comparatively
rare but they can be forecast - or fixed in time retrospectively,
using the same techniques - with great precision. Thus Ussher
used an eclipse to fix the birth date of Christ.
Ussher laboured over his studies for decades, even when he
became chaplain to the king of England, on the accession of
 DEPOSITION 21
Charles I. But as he approached old age Ussher's immersion in
the past was to be interrupted by a wave of violence in the
present.
As the storm clouds of the English Civil War gathered, the
autocratic King Charles sent new English colonists into Ireland,
and set up an Irish Army. His most bitter enemies, the Puritans
in Parliament, declared that the purpose of these moves was
the invasion of England and imposition of a royal tyranny, and
Parliament ordered that the administration of Ireland be
passed to Puritan lords justices.
For the Irish Catholics there couldn't have been a worse set
of rulers than these grandees, and a general rising became
inevitable. Ussher, as a Protestant landowner, was a target for
the fury. His chaplain at Drogheda was threatened with burn­
ing, with Ussher's precious books to be used as faggots beneath
his feet. Ussher himself had the good fortune to be in England
at the time of the Catholic eruption, and thus escaped seeing
his country houses plundered, his herds and flocks killed or
dispersed. However, Ussher could never return to Ireland - and
the turmoil left him broke, his income stream gone.
After Cromwell's military victory in the Civil War a union
of the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland was imposed.
Ireland, a conquered country, was parcelled out among the
soldiers and creditors of the Commonwealth. Meanwhile the
king was brought to London. Ussher, watching from the roof
of his protector's house in Charing Cross, fainted dead away
when Charles laid his neck on the executioner's block.

Even in the midst of this turmoil Ussher had doggedly con­

tinued his work. At last he found the key historical link in his
scrutiny of the Bible. It was a bland-looking reference to the
death of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon - but Ussher could
use this to link the Bible's chronology to Greek history, and
then via Roman history to the modern calendar. Ussher was
thus able finally to move on to an authoritative date for the
beginning of the world: 4004 bc, exactly four thousand years
before the birth of Christ himself.
As for the date and time, it was accepted that God would
have created the world at a solstice, as such a moment of
astronomical symmetry seemed appropriate as the instant of
22 AGES IN CHAOS

creation. Since the Garden of Eden was well stocked with fruit
when Adam and Eve first awoke, Ussher decided this must
have been the autumn equinox in October - and surely a
Sunday would be the first full day. Hence his selection of a
Saturday afternoon for the instant of creation itself, for then it
would follow that, according to the Genesis verse, 'the evening
and the morning were the first day'.
Thus, Ussher wrote triumphantly, 'the first day of the creation
[is] ... to be deduced'.
I can't quite imagine having in my world a text containing
truths, not derived by any human process, but transmitted
from a higher authority. Perhaps Ussher's Bible was like an
encyclopaedia received by radio from some advanced extra­
terrestrial civilisation, as in Carl Sagan's novel Contact.
Certainly, for later generations, giving up such an authoritative
source of information was going to be hard. As the Victorian
naturalist Philip Gosse said (so his son reported), 'If the written
Word is not absolutely authoritative, what do we know of God?
What more than we can infer, that is, guess - as the thoughtful
heathens guessed - Plato, Socrates, Cicero - from dim and mute
surrounding phenomena': not a bad summary of the uncertain
world view of modern science.
Whatever you think of Ussher's assumptions, though, you
can't argue with the quality of his scholarship.

In 1656, aged seventy-five, James Ussher died. Though he had

clearly been a Royalist, Cromwell recognised him as the fore­
most Biblical scholar of his time, and honoured him with a
state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey - though the
honour didn't extend to paying the bill. By the 1670s Ussher's
dates were being printed in new editions of the Bible, and by
1701 the use of his chronology had been authorised by the
Church of England. Soon the dates became as familiar a part
of the Bible as the ancient texts themselves, and Ussher's
chronology developed a theological weight. Ussher's was a
cosmogony constructed on a human scale. Even if the idea of
being trapped inside such a rapidly decaying universe was
claustrophobic, it was a comforting, even a cosy thought, that
behind us lay such a short morning.
Ussher's dates would no doubt have been included in the
 DEPOSITION 23
Hutton family Bible, and his 'Mosaic chronology' (after Moses)
would always form part of Hutton's thinking. He knew he
would have to present evidence to argue successfully against
the Biblical scholarship.
But Hutton was not the first to question Ussher. Even as
Ussher was publishing his great work, doubts were raised.
During the previous centuries Europeans had begun to travel
the world. And they encountered cultures which had their
own historical narratives, many of them contradicting the
Biblical account. The Chinese, for example, mocked the story
of Noah's Flood, which was supposed to have occurred around
2300 bc. Chinese written history stretched back centuries
before this date, and made no mention of a disastrous global
deluge. This news was received with great hostility in Europe,
where it was imagined that the Chinese must have exagger­
ated their timescales as a matter of cultural prestige, but Jesuit
missionaries in China believed the records of their hosts, and
despaired.
By the time of Hutton's youth it was obvious there was
something wrong. You didn't even have to look at the rocks to
know that.
 3
‘A mind formed for different
pursuits'
In November 1740, at the age of fourteen, Hutton entered the
University of Edinburgh, where he was to study 'humanities'.
Edinburgh was a packed, lively, exciting place to be.
Compared to London it was still a small city, and the folk
were crammed into the dank and dark wynds of the Old
Town. But it was full of energy. James Boswell described
running home after class, past 'advocates, writers, Scotch
Hunters, cloth-merchants, Presbyterian ministers, country
lairds, captains both by land and sea, porters, chairmen ...'In
the taverns there were regular performances by amateur
musicians on harpsichord, violin and especially the flute,
which was very popular. There was even dancing. The
aristocrats would mount 'assemblies' in their homes, of an
elegance to match anything to be seen in London or Paris, and
since the 1730s it had been possible even for ministers of the
Kirk to learn to dance without ostracism. In taverns and
hotels, the claret flowed by day and night. For the teenage
Hutton, revelling in his studies and his new social life, it must
have been a very heaven.
Hutton had once again benefited from his country's historical
legacy. The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582 by James
VI, had been Scotland's first post-Reformation college. And as
the vast post-Union hangover suffered by the country as a
whole slowly dissipated, the old theological monopoly on the
curriculum was broken. Under a new liberal regime there were
professorships in medicine, law, mathematics and 'natural
philosophy' (the sciences). The Scottish universities were still
small, but drew students from across Protestant Europe, since
religious restrictions barred many students from the great
English colleges.
Meanwhile, university education in Scotland was re­
markably cheap and accessible. The sons of farmers and
 DEPOSITION 15
shopkeepers and builders, some, like Hutton, as young as
thirteen or fourteen, would enter the universities alongside
the sons of aristocrats and landowners: perhaps half the
students at the University of Edinburgh came from middle­
class backgrounds. To get in, all you needed was a knowledge
of Latin, an ability to pay a fee of perhaps five pounds a year -
and to be male, of course.
Hutton, though, had a wayward mind. One day, bored by a
lecture on logic, he was distracted by a chance remark from
the professor on how acids may be used and combined to
dissolve metals. The professor was trying to illustrate some
wider philosophical point, soon forgotten. But for Hutton, this
sparked an attraction to chemistry's mysteries.
Perhaps, as Playfair would speculate, chemistry's appeal to
Hutton was that 'Nature, while she keeps the astronomer
and the mechanician at a great distance, seems to admit
[the chemist] to ... a more intimate acquaintance with her
secrets.' Certainly Hutton's hands-on exploration of chem­
istry would 'decide the whole course and complexion of
his future life' - and would eventually prove a source of
significant income.
Hutton began to search for material on his new passion, but
pursuing academic interests wasn't so easy in the mid­
eighteenth century. There was no TV, no Internet: there would
be no Encyclopaedia Britannica until 1768. There wasn't even
a separate chemistry curriculum at the university.
The only way Hutton found to follow up his new interest
was through John Harris's Lexicon Technician. Published in
1704, this 'Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences'
was actually the first encyclopaedia approaching a modern
form to be published in English. The Lexicon was important in
that it emphasised scientific and technical subjects, and con­
tained clear engraved plates, practical text and bibliographies.
It was incomplete by modern standards, however: it had no
cross-referencing, for example.
Meanwhile, Hutton was lucky enough to study mathematics
under Colin Maclaurin. Maclaurin, aged just forty-two when
Hutton entered the university, was one of Britain's foremost
mathematicians. Born in Argyllshire, he was a child prodigy
who had entered the University of Glasgow at the age of
26 AGES IN CHAOS

eleven, was a full professor by nineteen, and a member of

the Royal Society of London by twenty-one. Maclaurin's name
is still known today to millions of mathematics students
through the 'Maclaurin series', a way of analysing mathematical
functions.
Hutton wasn't so impressed at first. He professed to admire
Maclaurin's lectures, but he 'cultivated the mathematical
sciences less than any other'. However, the teachings of
Maclaurin would shape his thinking profoundly - for Maclaurin
was Hutton's link to Newton.

Sir Isaac Newton, physicist and mathematician, had been the

towering figure of the previous century's scientific revolution.
Maclaurin had become acquainted with Newton through the
Royal Society, and it was Newton who had recommended
Maclaurin for his professorship in Edinburgh - indeed, Newton
offered to pay a contribution towards Maclaurin's salary.
Maclaurin would go on to extend Newton's work in calculus,
geometry and gravitation, and through Maclaurin, Edinburgh
would become a centre for the teaching of Newton's work, and
his broader philosophy.
Newton had followed in the footsteps of René Descartes.
A shy Frenchman who had been forced to conceal his radical
thinking from the savagery of the Inquisition, Descartes
had tried to develop a new kind of philosophy based on
reason. With such methods, 'there is nothing so remote',
Descartes said, 'that it cannot be reached' - not even the
birth of Earth, on which Descartes speculated. Descartes's
work set out the first modern model of the universe as
a place governed by a few simple laws. Newton would
build on this, replacing Descartes's undefined principles
of nature with precise and mathematical rules of motion,
force and gravity.
But the new 'mechanical philosophies' didn't just give students
like Hutton new tools to study Nature. They gave them a new
way to think about God.
'Newton infers, from the structure of the visible world, that
it is governed by the One almighty, and All-wise Being,'
Maclaurin would write. 'The simplicity of the laws that
prevail in the world, the excellent disposition of things, in
 DEPOSITION 27
order to obtain the best ends, and the beauty which adorns the
work of nature, far superior to any thing in art, suggest his
consummate Wisdom.' Maclaurin's students were taught that
the world around us is not the work of the Devil or a ruin of
some more perfect past time, as conventional readings of
scripture would have it, but an orderly and bountiful place that
reflects the generosity of God and the regularity and symmetry
of His natural laws.
This 'Deist' thinking, a major break from the orthodox
religious traditions of the time, had originated in
seventeenth-century France, and flourished in England in the
first half of the eighteenth century. The Deists accepted the
Bible's moral authority but rejected its literal interpretation
as a true history of the world. God wasn't banished, but His
role was restricted to setting the universal laws. He
emphatically did not tinker day to day in the working of the
world, through miracles and Floods. Newton's vision of a
world governed by simple laws led to its natural incorpora­
tion into the Deist vision, even though this was to some
extent a misinterpretation of what Newton himself believed.
Later Deism became well rooted in revolutionary America,
counting Benjamin Franklin and the first three Presidents
among its adherents.
This kind of thinking and its uplifting message - that the
world is an orderly place, governed by comprehensible and
unchanging forces in balance, and reflecting a divine design -
had a profound impact on the young Hutton, and its
influence would show in his later scientific work. In language
clearly echoing Maclaurin's, he would write four decades
later of 'the globe of this Earth as a machine, constructed
upon chemical as well as mechanical principles, by which its
different parts are all adapted, in form, in quality, and in
quantity, to a certain end; an end attained with certainty or
success; and an end from which we may perceive wisdom, in
contemplating the means employed.' A seed of religious
doubt seems also to have been planted, which would*come to
full flower later in his life.
The brilliant Maclaurin must have seemed a Moses to his
students, a personal acquaintance of the God-like Newton
already more than a decade dead.
18 AGES IN CHAOS

Hutton prospered at university, his mind'flowering, intellec­

tual avenues opening. 'His taste and capacity for instruction
were sufficiently conspicuous during his course of academical
study,' said Playfair. But after three years of study, Hutton had
to leave.

William Hutton had left his family comfortable but not

wealthy. His son, as the only male in a family of five, was the
most likely to gain decently paid employment, and, just
seventeen years old, he had to shoulder his responsibilities.
Hutton's college enthusiasms did not offer a way forward as a
possible career. The Industrial Revolution had scarcely begun,
and it would only be in later decades that chemistry came of
age as a practical subject, largely spurred by the need to replace
natural bleaching techniques based on sunlight, rain, sour
milk and urine. Science itself was still more a hobby of
independently wealthy men than a career with a well-defined
path. So, though going into business 'was by no means congenial
to his mind', Hutton gave in to pressure from his family and
friends and did just that.
He was placed as an apprentice to a 'writer to the Signet'
(what the English would have called a solicitor - the job was
named after the royal signet used to authorise legal documents).
As Playfair said, 'Under the subjection of the routine of a
laborious employment, [Hutton] was now about to check the
ardour and repress the originality of a mind formed for
different pursuits.' Hutton soon found himself buried in
dry-as-dust detail.
Even as a legal clerk, though, young Hutton might have found
some intellectual stimulation. The Scottish legal tradition had
been jealously guarded through the negotiation of the Act of
Union. Though the two systems had sprung from the same root
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, English law had become
inward-looking, relying on a body of precedent, the mass of
previous decisions handed down over the generations. But the
Scottish lawyers looked to the Continent, where the ancient
principles of Roman law had been rediscovered and revived:
Scottish judges were encouraged to rely not just on precedent but
on reason, based on principles of fairness and justice. Thus, even
in the law, Scotland was becoming a land of reason, not dogma.
 DEPOSITION 29
But the law, Scottish or otherwise, wasn't for Hutton. Once
again his mind refused to stay disciplined. His employers found
him amusing himself and his pals with chemistry experiments
during work time, when he should have been studying legal
forms or copying papers. Hutton was fired - or as Playfair
tactfully tells us: 'With much good sense and kindness, there­
fore, [his master] advised [Hutton] to think of some employment
better suited to his turn of mind.'
Young Hutton now settled on a new career path: in medicine.
At first glance this was a good choice. Medicine was an
honourable profession, it was (and is) perpetually secure, and,
as Playfair noted, it was 'the most nearly allied to chemistry'.
Hutton began his studies under a doctor called George Young,
and he started to attend lectures at the university again, just a
year after leaving it the first time.
Back at the university Hutton quickly became fast friends
with a fellow medical student known as John Clerk of Eldin.
The Clerks were distinguished for their intellectual ability and
public spirit. Sir John Clerk, Eldin's father, had actually been
one of the commissioners who negotiated the Union with
England. As a younger man, though, Sir John had flirted with
more seditious tendencies,- during his Grand Tour of Europe in
the 1690s he had rubbed shoulders with cardinals and
contessas and nearly became a Catholic. On his return to
Scotland he had realised where his interests lay, and from the
beginning of the eighteenth century to his death, he never
wavered in his belief in the rightness of the Union for England
and Scotland alike. Eldin's brother George, who would become
known as George Clerk-Maxwell, was nicknamed 'the late
king's Godson' since he had been born in the year of the
'Fifteen - the abortive Jacobite uprising of 1715 - and had been
loyally named for George I.
The Clerk family would remain close to Hutton throughout
his life - and they quickly proved an important influence, for
they were wealthy landowners who for generations had mined
coal from their extensive Midlothian tracts. As mine'iiwners,
they had a strong practical interest in the structure and riches
of the Earth. This period, then, was not just the start of
Hutton's medical career, but perhaps also marked the birth of
his interest in geology. He was still only eighteen.
30 AGES IN CHAOS

What was the student Hutton like? His- only contemporary

biographer, Playfair, would know him only in old age, and of
this period Playfair tells us only that Hutton 'pursued with
great ardour the studies of chemistry and anatomy'. But we
can be sure that young Hutton was a lively, stimulating and
gregarious companion, who made friends easily: 'His conversa­
tion was extremely animated and forcible, and, whether serious
or gay, full of ingenious and original observation ... A brighter
tint of gaiety and cheerfulness spread itself over every counte­
nance when [Hutton] entered the room.' Playfair, moreover,
had an interest in sanitising the image of Hutton. We know
from Hutton's letters that he was in later life a lusty man, fond
of drink, eating well and of other physical pleasures - but
Playfair is silent on all this. He also liked bawdy jokes! In a
letter to the engineer James Watt written in 1774, Hutton said
a local entrepreneur had been consulting him about a patent
for a new improved bed: 'I'm thinking of adding to it a machine
which shall be called the muscular motion whereby all the
several parts shall be performed of erection, intrusion,
reciprocation and injection ...'
At the age of eighteen, it was surely not just chemistry and
anatomy that attracted Hutton's ardour.
While Hutton's young life enjoyed a new beginning, however,
his country was about to undergo great anguish.

On 23 July 1745 the Young Pretender, Prince Charles, returned

from exile overseas to land in the western Highlands. He
brought with him seven men, no money and no weapons. Even
though by now only the oldest Scots could actually remember
a time when a Stuart king had occupied the throne, their
romantic legend burned fiercely, and within weeks the Prince
had gathered an army of Highlanders.
Whether you called what followed a 'rising' or a 'rebellion'
depended largely on whether you were Jacobite or Hanoverian.
The military authorities were surprisingly unprepared. Even
the Highland forts and barracks - completed at considerable
expense since the last Jacobite rising - were so undermanned
that their garrisons could do nothing but watch as the Prince's
ragtag army marched past on their way south.
Charles enjoyed some rest and recreation at the ancient
 DEPOSITION 31
Stuart palace at Linlithgow, where he made the fountain run
with red wine. Then the Highlanders marched, unopposed, on
Edinburgh.
 4
‘Every man was a soldier’

The roots of the 'Forty-Five reached back to the aftermath of

Union.
After a great deal of agonising the Act of Union had been
passed in 1707. Even the negotiations had caused widespread
civil unrest; for a time Edinburgh was placed under martial
law. But the more realistic of Scotland's rulers understood that
the country had effectively long been run from England
anyhow, and that they may as well seek the benefits to trade
that a formal union would bring. Edinburgh had become a
capital without a king, court or parliament - but the preserva­
tion of the country's law, church and universities would ensure
that Hutton's Edinburgh would be well stocked with lawyers,
scholars and clergymen, but mercifully few professional
politicians.
The immediate aftermath of Union was deeply unhappy,
however. Suddenly customs and excise duties were imposed
from London, at much higher rates. For a time smuggling became
almost a patriotic act, and customs officials - especially if they
were English - could face personal danger as they went about
their work. What made it all worse was the attitude of the
English. When Scottish members of the London parliament
asked for an equality of taxation treatment in Scottish linen
and English wool, the Lord Treasurer replied, 'Have we not
bought the Scots, and a right to tax them?'
Discontent in Scotland found a focus in the continuing
existence 'over the water' in France of Stuart pretenders to the
throne: Charles I's son James Edward, the 'Old Pretender' (the
word 'Jacobite' comes from the Latin Jacobus, for James), and
James' son Charles Edward, the 'Young Pretender'. The allure
of the Stuarts was magnetic: they represented, at least in hind­
sight, a simpler, more stable time. The Stuarts even had
supporters among the intellectuals, including Samuel Johnson
and Alexander Pope. There were abortive Jacobite risings in
 DEPOSITION 33
1715 and 1719. But the 'Forty-Five was a different matter.
The War of Jenkins's Ear (arising from a clash between the
Spanish authorities and one Captain Jenkins, an English
privateer off the coast of Cuba) had enmeshed Britain in a
European war with Spain's allies, including France. The
British, desperate for troops, stripped garrisons in northern
England and Scotland. Realising this, the French made plans to
land a force in Scotland, thereby opening a second front. Prince
Charles, twenty-four years old, was charming, handsome,
personable, and the French saw him as an ideal figurehead for
this adventure. When a storm scattered the French invasion
fleet - a 'Protestant wind', as some called it - the French grew
cool, Charles frustrated. Charles concocted a new plan: to land
in Scotland with only a few supporters and to raise an army
himself. Even loyal followers called this a 'mad enterprise', but
Charles was driven by a reckless sense of personal destiny.
In the Highlands, Charles's arrival was a spark to dry tinder.
In the glens, the clan system, that strange, anachronistic
echo of pre-feudal times, still functioned. Modern standards of
life dissipated as you travelled north: the clan chief's rule
remained absolute, even over life and death. The Highlanders
lived in one-room houses of mud and stone, called bothies.
From a distance you would think a typical village was just a
huddle of mounds of dirt: it was a shock to realise that these
heaps housed human beings - even though by now their chiefs
wore lace and drank claret, and sent their sons to the Lowland
universities.
By 1745, though, the Highlanders were on the brink of
starvation. Six hundred thousand people lived on glacier-
scraped soil which, given the farming techniques of the time,
could support perhaps only half that number. The theft of
cattle from neighbouring clans had become an industry, even a
necessity for survival. But in the Highlands, as Johnson said,
'every man was a soldier', and now a Stuart was calling them
to arms. The burning crosses, the ancient summons'of the
clans, blazed from mountain to mountain. "
John Maclean, a typical volunteer, was a Maclean of
Kingairloch, a clan whose main territories were on the island
of Mull. An officer of the Black Watch in his thirties, he
decided to switch sides to the Prince. He travelled across the
34 AGES IN CHAOS

Sound of Mull and met the Prince at Kinldch-moidart where,

he recorded in his journal,' 'I had the honour and Satisfaction
to Get a kiss of his royal Highness his hand.' Charles made
Maclean a captain; Maclean would follow the Prince all the
way to Culloden.
In Edinburgh, and in Glasgow and Aberdeen, there was no
desire to see Charles succeed. In the cities the Union had
gradually brought affluence and prosperity, just as its wiser
designers had hoped. The new urban middle classes were
marching to a better future, but the return of the Stuarts would
mean a reversion to an older Scotland.
But now a Stuart army approached Edinburgh itself.

The military situation was grave. Edinburgh Castle was a

fortress housing a royal garrison, and was the base of the
British government's Scottish Command. But a foreign war
had bled the garrison down to three thousand troops, most of
them inexperienced or of doubtful loyalty. Then, as Charles's
army approached, the English commander in Edinburgh
withdrew altogether.
Suddenly, incredibly, Edinburgh was left defenceless. The
citizens were thrown into a state of panic, wonder and excite­
ment, 'all being in the greatest flurry and confusion', as one
observer said. Many of the city's establishment fled to Berwick
- where, bizarrely, they indulged in betting games on the
progress of the rebels. The town council emphatically did not
rise to the occasion. They showed no desire, and formulated no
plan, to oppose the approaching army.
Into the breach stepped two private citizens: a merchant called
George Drummond - and Colin Maclaurin, the Gaelic-speaking
disciple of Newton and professor of mathematics to Hutton.
Drummond and Maclaurin called for volunteers to assist the
undermanned garrison. Many students came forward. The
'College Company of Volunteers' were academics and clerics,
the pillars of the Scottish Enlightenment in the decades to come.
And now they were putting their lives on the line to save the
city from the advance of the 'wyld heighland men'. We don't
know if young Hutton was a volunteer. But, caught up in the
swirl of these exciting events, Hutton must have thrilled to see
his old maths professor assuming command in such a way.
 DEPOSITION 35
The students were joined by elderly men wearing the great
periwigs of their youth, and country folk carrying fowling
pieces and water canteens as if ready for a day on the hills. It
was a motley bunch, and their preparation was amateurish.
They were stood up and stood down in turns in what they
called a 'Grand Old Duke of York' game. Still, they dug out
what armaments they could find, including cannon of various
vintages that they set up on the city walls and, dressed in their
great watch-coats, they began picket duty. Maclaurin designed
improvements in the city's defences and vigorously supervised
the work. He was assisted in this by Robert Adam, a future
architect of note, then just seventeen. But the fortifications, in
large part, were no more intimidating a barrier than a garden
wall.
As time wore on, no reinforcements arrived from England.
And on 15 September the city learned that the Jacobite army
was only eight miles away.
The advancing Highlanders evoked genuine fear. They
carried broadswords and scimitar-like 'Turks' for close-quarter
fighting, and wooden shields called targes, studded and bossed
with the interiors still bearing animal hair. They wore their
tartans in complicated arrangements of kilted shirts, breeches
and sporrans. Into their belts were hooked pistols, dirks and
daggers. They had cavalry, including hussars, a type of unit
new to British armies. With their furred caps, long swords and
billows of plaid over their shoulders, the hussars would form a
ferocious guard around the Prince as he travelled.
While the leading men of each clan were well armed, their
peasant followers, coming from a background of extreme
poverty, were less well equipped: some had nothing more than
stakes pulled out of hedges. Even this, though, added to the
menace. As Walter Scott would write, 'The grim, uncombed
and wild appearance of these men ... created surprise in the
Lowlands, but it also created terror.'
On that bright September day, the Edinburgh volunteers
assembled and marched through the Old Town to meet the
oncoming Highlanders, flags flying and drums beating - but
most of the citizens barred their windows. Those who did
watch the volunteers go greeted them with jeers, insults or
even tears. Many looked, it was said, as if they were being
36 AGES IN CHAOS

taken to their execution. And'here came the principal of the

university to urge the 'flower of the youth of Edinburgh' not to
waste their lives. Nerves weakened.
As the volunteers neared the West Port, their commander,
Drummond, turned around to find his troops had disappeared,
melting away into the wynds and taverns. The volunteers'
resistance had ended before it had begun.
The next day, one of Charles's reconnoitring parties snuck
into the city through a carelessly opened gate. The castle, with
its garrison, remained secure, but the rest of the city fell with­
out most of its inhabitants even knowing it, until they woke
the next morning to find fierce-looking Highlanders manning
the walls. Government officials hastily fled to the safety of
Berwick. Maclaurin fled to England, to be sheltered by the
Archbishop of York. Perhaps it was well that the city fell
without a fight; it was largely spared any retaliatory destruction.

Charles would occupy the capital for five weeks. He established

his court at Holyroodhouse, and his army made its camp in
Holyrood Park, in the lee of Arthur's Seat. There was much
softening of resolve as the Prince's troops were seduced by the
city's taverns, and the palace buzzed with excitement as the
Pretender gave assemblies, entertainments, and even a grand
ball. Many of Edinburgh's ladies were said to have declared for
Charles, captivated by his good looks and gallantry and the
romantically heroic way in which he had thrown himself on
the mercies of his countrymen. It was a woman who first
called him the 'Bonnie Prince'. But there were some uglier
scenes. In one of the infirmaries wounded Highlanders were
set upon by a mob of citizens who tore open raw wounds and
twisted arms and legs that had been set after fractures.
Sir John Clerk, the father of Hutton's college friend, had
served in the government militia during the 'Fifteen. Now
sixty-nine years old, he had left his estate at Penicuik in the
hands of his sons and made for Durham. When the rebels came
to Penicuik they demanded hay and oats, under penalty of
burning the house down. However, Sir John wrote, 'When the
Highland parties came they were civilly used and so
committed no disorders about the House except that they
eated and drank all they cou'd find, and called for everything
 DEPOSITION 37
as they thought fit, for they lookt on them selves as the Masters
of all the Country.'
Hutton, trying to go about his business in the city, would have
had to get used to Highlander sentries on the streets. Some of
them had brought their families and other camp-followers.
You might see a Highlander having his hair deloused by his
woman, accompanied by a screeching brood of children. The
poorer troopers were often reduced to begging openly in the
streets. For all concerned, it was a strange, atavistic time.
Charles's next military move was to set off south and try
to foment rebellion in England. By 9 November the army
had reached the boundary between the kingdoms. Charles's
'Highland savages' astonished the English as they marched
through Manchester, Lancaster, Derby - through what, in fewer
than fifty years, would become England's industrial heartland.
At Derby, Captain John Maclean 'missed the Seeing of a
Curious Silk Manufactory which ... had (as I was told) more
than ninety thousand motions'. By December, Charles was
just 130 miles from London.
But English support for the Jacobites, seen as essential to
sustain the rising, was always fitful. And by now three armies
were closing on Charles - including one commanded by the Duke
of Cumberland, the King's brother and a veteran of European
wars, in whose forces Hutton's friend George Clerk-Maxwell
now served. To evade their enemy the rebels were subjected to
forced marches of fifteen or twenty kilometres a day, in harsh
wintry conditions. At Derby, Charles's advisers forced him to
accept the inevitability of falling back.
The retreat was ugly, however. On the way south Charles's
troops had behaved well, but now they lost their discipline,
and their looting - and rumours of the slaughter of wounded
English soldiers - left a legacy of rage. In Glasgow the merchants
had their revenge for the disruption to their trade. They raised
a regiment of militia which attached itself to the forces of
government troops and diehard volunteers who now converged
to retake Edinburgh. The capital was liberated on January
1746.
On 16 April Charles, out of money and supplies, not even on
speaking terms with his field commander, drew up his troops
for their final stand at Culloden. It would be the last clash in
38 AGES IN CHAOS

Europe between a modern army and a pré-modern force; the

Highlanders' last charge broke on English numbers, discipline
and technology.
In the Highlands, the aftermath was bitter. Cumberland was
convinced that only radical and extreme action would finally
root out the Highlanders' threat to the future of the Union. It
began on the field of Culloden itself. In Maclean's journal it is
recorded that, 'In this Battle the greatest barbarities was
Committed that ever was heard to be done by Either Christians
Turks or Pagan, I mean by our Enemies who gave no quarters
Killed our men that was wounded in cold blood and continued
so doing for three or four Days or any others they could Catch.'
These words were actually written by John Maclean's kinsman
Donald McLean, for John himself was killed during the battle.
And then the cleansing of the glens began, an action even
mighty Rome had not had the resources to see through. At
Greenock, a young James Watt saw his father's workshop
searched by troops pursuing the Prince. Five years after Charles
Stuart had fled to France, kilted fugitives were still being hunted
by armed patrols. The son and brother of kings, Cumberland
would earn himself the title of the Butcher.

Little of this remote tragedy touched the cities. There, Culloden

was portrayed as the defeat of an Antichrist. In Edinburgh,
Drummond replaced the disgraced Lord Provost. The young
volunteers were suddenly the heroes of the hour. Colin
Maclaurin returned from York. Unfortunately the ordeal of his
flight had damaged his health, and he would die in 1746, at the
age of forty-eight. His premature death was a significant loss;
in subsequent years Britain lost much of its influence in
European mathematics.
Hutton's biographer Playfair, a gentleman scientist writing
of these times sixty years later, would make no mention of the
whole incident. To Hutton's generation the 'Forty-Five must
have seemed embarrassing, a spasm of romantic and anachro­
nistic nationalism which had claimed, among very many other
casualties, a protégé of Newton - and had besides got in the
way of business. After this great interruption Hutton got back
to work at his studies, surely agreeing with Sir John Clerk,
who would write, 'The success of [Culloden] gave universal
 DEPOSITION 39
joy, especially to friends of the Government, but there were even
Jacobites who were at least content at what had happened, for
peace and quietness now began to break in, whereas Anxiety
and distress of various kinds had possessed the breasts of most
people ever since the Rebellion broke out. All Trade and
business in this Country were quite at a stand/
 5
'The Earth's blood is the
veins of its waters'
Edinburgh folk were determined that their city would become
distinguished in medicine, as in so many other areas of life.
John Monro, an army surgeon, was a conspicuous example:
he deliberately programmed the education of his son
Alexander to ensure that the boy would one day become
professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, and
sent him to study at the University of Leiden in Holland,
the acknowledged centre of European medicine. The father's
ambitions were fulfilled; Edinburgh would become the leading
academic centre for medicine in Britain, and Scottish doctors
would become pioneers in surgery and obstetrics. James Lind,
a naval surgeon from Edinburgh who would become a close
friend of Hutton, would introduce fresh fruit to the British
navy to prevent scurvy. Another Scotsman, James Pringle,
made essential recommendations regarding the welfare of
troops that would lead to the establishment of the Red Cross
organisation in 1864 - and three generations of Monros would
indeed teach anatomy at Edinburgh.
Despite these advances, much of the medicine studied by
Hutton in the 1740s would have seemed primitive to us. The
importance of public health and hygiene was only slowly
becoming understood. The science of pathology had yet to be
born, and vaccination (though long practised in the east) would
not become well established for fifty more years. In some
quarters the mentally ill were still held to be possessed by
demons. In Edinburgh, controversy raged over the teaching
of the writer John Brown: that there were fundamentally
only two diseases, sthenic (strong) and asthenic (weak), and only
two treatments were therefore ever required, stimulant and
sedative - Brown's own preferred remedies were alcohol and
opium.
No wonder Hutton developed a sour view of the profession.
 DEPOSITION 41
He would write in 1771, 'The more medical knowledge we
acquire, the more we know how little efficacious that art is.'
Nonetheless, he persevered, continuing his studies through
the period of the rebellion.
As Playfair would acknowledge, in Hutton's day the
Edinburgh medical school was 'neither in reality, nor in the
opinion of the world, so complete as it has since become [by
1805]. Some part of a physician's studies was still to be
prosecuted on the Continent.' So after three years at
Edinburgh, Hutton went abroad to complete his medical
education. His first stop was Paris. He arrived there in 1747,
aged just twenty-one.

It was quite an adventure. This was the Paris of more than four
decades before the Revolution: the city of Louis XV, his
mistresses and his scheming courtiers, a great and growing
metropolis of more than six hundred thousand people. The
Louvre, the Tuileries and the Champs-Elysées were all there to
be marvelled at, and the eastern stretch of the Grands
Boulevards was a fashionable promenade with many little
theatres and cafés. Such splendour must have made Edinburgh
seem small and provincial indeed. The political atmosphere
seems to have been relaxed, even though Hutton's stay
actually overlapped with a minor war between Britain and
France called King George's War - a convoluted affair deriving
from conflict over the Austrian succession and fuelled by
colonial rivalries in North America.
For a lively, intelligent, gregarious, lusty young man like
Hutton, far from his mother's watchful eye, Paris must have
been marvellous.
After two years in Paris Hutton made his way to the Low
Countries, where he would take his degree of Doctor of
Medicine, at no less a centre than the University of Leiden
itself.
Leiden was a city some thirty kilometres south-west of
Amsterdam and eight kilometres inland from the North Sea.
The old town was criss-crossed by a network of canals. The
dominant textile industry was in decline, leading to an economic
stagnation that would not end until the industrialisation of the
late nineteenth century. For Hutton, Leiden probably wasn't as
42 AGES IN CHAOS

much fun as Paris - but its reputation in medicine remained

unimpeachable.
Leiden's distinction derived largely from Hermann
Boerhaave, who had served at the university as professor« of
botany, chemistry and medicine. Boerhaave was the founder of
the modern system of teaching medical students at the
patient's bedside,- breaking away from medieval traditions, he
encouraged his students to use their eyes and ears in their
diagnoses. Boerhaave had been a great admirer of Isaac Newton
and his orderly scientific thinking, and he believed that such
principles should be applied to the study of the body and its
workings. Boerhaave's teaching attracted students from all
over Europe, and he had exerted an influence on the develop­
ment of medicine in Vienna and Germany - and, through
Monro, in Edinburgh.
Leiden, then, was a good place for Hutton to complete his
medical training. And the academic thesis he produced to
support his degree showed how, even by the age of twenty-
three, much of the thinking that would characterise his later
work was already maturing.

Hutton's thirty-four-page thesis, submitted on 12 September

1749, was written in French. Its title was De Sanguine et
Circulatione in Microcosmi - 'On the Circulation of Blood in
the Microcosm'.
In the seventeenth century, William Harvey's discovery of
the reality of the circulation of blood had been the greatest
medical triumph of the new post-Newtonian orderly scientific
thinking. But Harvey's inspirational idea was not so much
scientific as theological, for in the body's workings Harvey saw
evidence of purposeful design. Such arguments seem to have
struck Hutton deeply, and now he explored Harvey's thinking.
Design arguments had a deep tradition, reaching back to
Aristotle. What, Aristotle had asked, is the cause of the
existence of, say, your house? There is more than one cause.
First there are the bricks and mortar of which it is constructed.
These make up the material cause, without which the house
obviously could not exist. But somebody must do the work to
turn the pile of bricks into a home - this is the efficient cause.
Then even the dodgiest cowboy builder needs a blueprint to
 DEPOSITION 43
work from: the blueprint is the formal cause, the plan behind
the work. Finally the house must have a purpose: purpose
is the final cause. Aristotle's point was that you need all four
of these causes if the end product is to exist. Nobody would
build a house if it had no purpose; without a plan the work
could not be organised; and the building could not be
constructed if there were no materials to build it from.
Aristotle's ideas struck a deep chord with medieval western
culture. St Thomas Aquinas had realised that in Aristotle's
logic there was support for a proof of the existence of God:
there can be no final cause without a mind to frame the
purpose. However, one of the patrons of the philosophy of
modern science, Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth
century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should
be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies
on local problems and the interconnections between material
and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction:
'Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin
consecrated to God, produces nothing.'
Today we follow Aristotle's analysis if we are thinking about
objects constructed by humans for definite purposes. All our
artefacts - from hand-axes to cave paintings to inter­
continental ballistic missiles - clearly have a purpose of some
kind, a final cause. But modern scientists don't ascribe a
conscious design to inanimate objects. We say that the planets'
orbits of the sun are caused by gravity, but we don't believe
those orbits are for anything.
In Hutton's time, though, as Maclaurin had taught him, the
notions of design and final cause were far from defunct.
Newton himself had been a believer in design arguments. Even
a century after Hutton, Oxford geologist William Buckland
would claim that coal had been put there by God for our
purposes: '[the coal seams] were, ages ago, disposed in a
manner so admirably adapted to the benefit of the human
race.'
Harvey's work had shown that design argumerfts could
actually lead to significant discoveries. His study of valves in
the body's veins had 'invited [him] to imagine, that so
Provident a cause as Nature had not so placed so many valves
without Design' - the 'Design' being to circulate the blood
44 AGES IN CHAOS

through the systems of arteries and heart. Using such

principles Harvey was able to predict the existence of
capillaries, fine tubes, to close the circulatory loops; the
capillaries had later been duly discovered, just as predicted,,
Harvey admitted, 'The authority of Aristotle has always had
such weight with me that I never think of differing from him
considerably.'
Against this background Hutton began his thesis, not with
observations about blood, but by setting out, Maclaurin-like,
Deistic attitudes about the universe. God does not intervene
randomly in the affairs of the world, he argued. Nature is
everywhere governed by physical, chemical and mechanical
laws, and everywhere displays the wisdom and design of its
Creator. Blood is a particular example of this. Blood, wrote
Hutton, has been provided by God to maintain and nourish the
body. But blood is used up and destroyed at the same rate, so
that its supply is constant; blood orbits the body, he might
have said, in as orderly a way as the planets orbit the sun
(Harvey used this analogy himself). Thus nature shows
evidence of rational laws and a purposeful design in the body,
just as in Newton's cosmos above.
Hutton's title, meanwhile, actually harks back to another
old tradition of thought, dating from the classical thinkers: that
there is an analogy between the human body (the microcosm]
and the world as a whole (the macrocosm].
This idea had endured throughout the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, and came into focus in the work of Leonardo da
Vinci. Leonardo had developed a vision of a dynamic Earth, a
living world analogous to a human body: 'We may say that the
Earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its
bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the
mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone,- its blood the veins of
its waters.' It was a beautiful vision, and it shaped Leonardo's
art as well as his science. In the Mona Lisa the flows of the
model's hair and drapery emphasise the harmony between the
processes of her body and the verification of the watery,
changing Earth.
In Hutton's own time, the unity of a living creation tied
together by a 'Great Chain of Being', a hierarchy that spanned
from atoms to God, was a common notion. Perhaps Hutton
 DEPOSITION 45
had read Pope, who wrote in 1733: 'Vast chain of being! which
from God began, / Nature aethereal, human, angel, man, /
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, / No glass can
reach; from Infinite to thee, / From thee to nothing.'
Hutton's medical arguments were a remarkable foreshadow­
ing of his later visions of a geocosm: of our Earth as a unified
living world, designed by God to fulfil His divine purpose. In
1795 he would write, 'All the surface of this Earth is formed
according to a regular system of heights and hollows, hills and
valleys, rivulets and rivers, and these rivers return the waters
of the atmosphere into the general mass, in like manner as the
blood, returning to the heart, is conducted in the veins.' And
he would come to believe that just as our bodies are capable of
recovery from illness, so the Earth is capable of self-renewal:
'We are thus led to see a circulation in the matter of this globe,
as a system of beautiful economy in the works of nature. This
Earth, like the body of an animal, is wasted at the same time
that it is repaired.'
All this in a title,- Hutton did not explore these ideas in
detail in his text. Perhaps, given the religious orthodoxy of the
time, he did not dare say more.

Hutton was awarded his medical degree in 1749. By now his

restless mind was already wandering away from medicine, and
even from chemistry, his first love. For his travels had brought
a new realm of mystery to his attention: the mystery of the
rocks.
After his introduction to geology in the Clerks' mines,
Hutton probably attended Professor François Rouelle's
lectures on mineralogy in Paris. Rouelle pioneered ideas,
concerning the order in which rocks had been laid down, that
would later become highly significant. It is certainly possible
that Hutton noted some peculiarities in the rocks of the
countrysides he visited - so different from the ancient,
tortured landscapes of Scotland. Forty years later, lecturing to
a learned audience, he would describe the landscape of France
and the Low Countries, and urged his listeners 'to examine the
chalk-countries of France and England, in which the flint is
found variously formed ... More particularly, I would
recommend an examination of the insulated masses of stone,
46 AGES IN CHAOS

found in the sand-hills by the city of Brussels; a stone which is

formed by the injection of flint among sand.'
Flint nodules in sandstone: it sounds an innocuous enough
observation. But the trouble was, as Hutton surely realised by
now from Professor Rouelle's lectures, that the primitive
geological theories of the time had absolutely no explanation
for how those nodules had got there.
 6
"Upon this chaos rode
the distressed ark"
We live on a restless Earth. Our continents are rafts floating
over a hot, turbulent mantle; over geological time they drift,
collide, merge and shatter.
Some two hundred and fifty million years ago, the
continents began to converge into a single land mass: Pangaea,
a union of all Earth's landscapes. In Scotland, compressed at
the heart of a supercontinent, there was volcanism: the great
cores on which Edinburgh is built are a relic of this era.
Pangaea's tremendous geological unity was ephemeral, soon
shattered by great oceanic rifts. The opening up of a divide
between Greenland and Scotland would sunder Europe from
North America for good - or at least until the time of the next
supercontinental congress in the distant future. It is strange to
think that the border between England and Scotland, so long
the scene of bloody battles between the nations, is a genuine
physical boundary - the place two continents collided - and
that the Great Glen is actually a geological fault whose
extension can be traced across the Atlantic to Greenland and
Newfoundland.
Later, as dinosaurs hunted, the oceans rose. On the floors of
the shallow seas which covered much of Britain, great layers of
chalk built up. The final touches to Scotland's geological
formation were made over the last two million years, as ice
sheets, kilometres thick, crushed and gouged the hardest
bedrock. Britain was left with one of the most varied geological
landscapes in the world, from the ancient, contorted basement
rocks of Scotland's far north to the soft hills of southern
England - chalk hills, untouched by the glaciers, justsixty-five
million years old. It is a remarkable geological story, whose
outcome is a landscape of beauty and drama - and it is a story
told in the rocks that remain, distorted, eroded, uplifted and
shattered.
48 AGES IN CHAOS

Hutton's interest in geology grew. Playfair said he 'became

very fond of studying the surface of the Earth, and was looking
with anxious curiosity into every pit, or ditch, or bed of a river
that fell in his way'. Perhaps he glimpsed something of the
titanic story of the past in the rocks he studied, and he must
have longed to understand more; but he found himself
illiterate in a great library of what he would call 'God's books'
- and there was nobody in the world who could have taught
him to read.
In his geological curiosity, though, he was in distinguished
company.

Once, when Leonardo was working on his great equestrian

statue to Francesco Forza in Milan, some peasants brought
him a large sack of fossilised shells and corals. This wasn't so
remarkable - except that the shells had been found high in the
Apennine mountains. Hutton himself would later observe 'sea
shells in the travelled soil a considerable height above the level
of the sea' in a colliery at Kinneil, which he visited in 1765 to
view James Watt's first steam engine: 'There is a bed of oyster
shells some feet deep appearing in the side of the bank, about
twenty or thirty feet above the level of the sea, which
corresponds with old sea banks ...'
Sea creatures on mountain tops?
If the study of the Bible for clues about Earth's origins had a
long tradition, a fascination with the rocks that formed Earth's
surface was older still. The Mediterranean is one of the world's
most active seismic and volcanic regions, and many Greek and
Roman thinkers of the classical age had been intrigued by
volcanoes, earthquakes and the nature of rocks. Strabo, alive at
the time of Christ's birth, wondered if volcanoes were like
natural safety valves, a release for the Earth's trapped vapours.
In western Europe after the Renaissance, there was a grow­
ing interest in Earth and its riches. The demand for minerals
was increasing, not least because the replacement of medieval
feudalism by capitalism created a need for various precious
metals for coinage. This led to new and more pragmatic
geological works based on what was actually found in the
ground. For example, Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica,
published in Basle in 1556, gave a fine discussion of the
 DEPOSITION 49
occurrence of mineral veins in the field, and tips on practical
geology.
From the beginning, though, fossils like those of Leonardo
and Hutton had posed special puzzles.
In the fifth century bc, Herodotus had noticed marine shells
far inland in Egypt, and had speculated that they had been left
there by the retreating waves of some earlier sea. Earlier still,
Pythagoras had wondered if fossils observed high in the Greek
mountains could be evidence of the elevation of an old sea bed.
In Leonardo's time, fossils were called 'figured stones'. In
France, Italy, Germany and America, people gaped at huge
bones and tremendous teeth thought to have come from the
drowned corpses of the 'giants' mentioned in the Bible. (Many
of these relics eventually turned out to be from the vanished
fauna of the Ice Age: mammoths and mastodons, cave bears
and woolly rhinos.)
But for the scholars, the most baffling questions about
fossils were much more subtle. These awkward articles looked
like nothing so much as copies, in stone, of the relics of living
things: bones, and the teeth of sharks, and the shells of sea
creatures. What were they - and how had they got inside solid
rock?
The similarity of the fossils to living counterparts, so
obvious to modern eyes, wasn't seen as a clinching proof of
their organic origin. God was thought to have imbued His
creation with similarities on different scales to display the
harmony of His thoughts. Thus the existence of seven
'planets' (the sun, Moon and the five planets known to the
ancients) was in accordance with the seven notes of a musical
scale. Perhaps God had simply granted rocks with the ability
to form objects exactly like animal parts. Why not? Everything
was part of God's narrative, to be written as He wished.
But with arguments like that, you could explain away
literally anything - in the nineteenth century Charles Lyell
would observe in such theories 'a desire manifested to cut,
rather than patiently untie, the Gordian knot' - and^anyhow
such justifications weren't much practical use in figuring out
where the best mineral veins were. From these and other
dissatisfactions, a new way of thinking about the Earth began
to emerge.
50 AGES IN CHAOS

Nicolaus Steno had come to reside in Tuscany. A Catholic

convert, in 1677 he would-be appointed the Titular Bishop of
Titiopolis (now part of modern Turkey). The see of a titular
bishop covered areas in partibus infidelium - in the hands .of
unbelievers, so not available for actual occupancy - but Steno
would earn his living by ministering to those scattered
Catholic communities that clung on in post-Reformation
Germany, Norway and Denmark.
Like Hutton, Steno had a medical background. He was an
anatomist, and his ordination actually led to him giving up his
science. His contribution to geology - monumental in
retrospect - came almost as an afterthought to his secular
career, just before his energies were elevated to higher things.
In 1666, Steno was sent the head of a great shark, caught off
the coast near the town of Livorno. Steno was already aware of
glossipetrae - 'tongue stones', fossils shaped oddly like sharks'
teeth that could be collected by the barrel-load, especially in
Malta. To Steno the anatomist, now able to compare the fossils
with modern specimens, it was undeniable that these trinkets
really did look like sharks' teeth - they were identical in form,
in fact. But the old questions remained: how could sharks'
teeth get inside the rocks?
Steno tried to take some of the arbitrariness out of geology.
He followed Descartes's thinking that all phenomena must
have physical causes: even fossilised sharks' teeth embedded
in rocks must have a rational explanation. Steno set out rules
of geological thinking. First he stated a principle of similarity:
'If a solid substance is in every way like another solid
substance, not only as regards the conditions of its surface, but
also as regards the inner arrangement of parts and particles,
it will also be like it as regards the manner and place of
production.' If it looks like a shark's tooth - if you take it apart
and, to every level you can examine it, it still looks like a
shark's tooth - then it is, or at least was, a shark's tooth.
Second, Steno set out a principle of moulding. If you find
one object inside another, you can tell which formed first by
seeing which has left impressions on the other. A fossilised
shark's tooth leaves an impression on the hardened sediment
that encases it, like a footprint in wet sand, so the shark's
tooth must have been there first.
 DEPOSITION 51
Steno's introduction of orderly and systematic thinking is
rightly seen as a foundation stone of modern geology. The
application of Steno's intellect to purely religious matters in
later years has to be seen as a loss. But Steno's principles
caused much sharp intaking of breath among his contem­
poraries. For one thing, he was limiting the actions of God, by
arguing that He did not arbitrarily allow rocks to make copies
of sharks' teeth.
And, Steno said, not everything had been made all at once.
First the shark's tooth fell to the bottom of the sea, then the
sediments closed over it, then they consolidated into rock ...
Earth was a dynamic object; though perhaps only six thousand
or so years old, Earth had changed in that time. Suddenly Earth
had a history, and you could reconstruct that history from the
rocks. For many thinkers Steno's arguments were electrifying.
We know that Hutton, his geological curiosity deepening,
read some of the speculative accounts which followed Steno's
work of how the Earth might have come to be - but he found
that in all these works geology was still seen as 'the hand­
maiden of the Bible', the great book where the core truths of
the universe were to be found.

The Reverend Thomas Burnet, Anglican clergyman, was a

contemporary of Newton at Cambridge. One day he would
become the private chaplain of King William III. He was drawn
to geological mysteries after a visit to the Alps. Jagged, twisted
and broken, the mountains seemed to Burnet like signs of a
'World lying in its Rubbish'. Surely God would have created a
perfect world, not this heap of rubble. But if mountains
weren't part of the original world, how had they got there?
Burnet's musing on these questions led to his publishing,
between 1680 and 1690, the four books of his Telluris Theoria
Sacra - or, to give it its full and unassuming title, The Sacred
Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of
the Earth, and of the General Changes which it has Already
Undergone, or it is to Undergo, Till the Consummation of All
Things. Hutton read this avidly.
The Reverend Burnet's programme was to start with the
Bible story as a given. 'In the beginning God created the
heavens and the Earth. And the Earth was vzithout form, and
52 AGES IN CHAOS

void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the
spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said,
Let there be light: and there was light...' The ancient words of
the Book of Genesis surely still thrill even non-believers. For
Burnet's generation, the goal of natural scientists was to seek
physical causes to justify the sacred story: essentially you had
to invent a physics to explain away the Bible's events, from the
Creation to the present day. (In modern times, Immanuel
Velikovsky has pursued a similar programme based on the
texts of ancient civilisations.)
But in fulfilling this programme Burnet was determined to
cling to Descartes's principles of the steady operations of
natural forces. God made the world right the first time, and
left it to run by itself. To imagine otherwise is to belittle Him:
'We think him a better artist that makes a clock that strikes
regularly at every hour from the springs and wheel which he
puts in the work, than he that hath so made his clock that he
must put his finger to it every hour to make it strike.' Burnet's
task was to reconstruct the orderly operation of God's great
terrestrial clock.
The centrepiece of Burnet's tale was Noah's Flood. As the
most spectacular geological event since the Creation itself,
perhaps the Flood could be invoked as the agent that had killed
off all the creatures whose relics were now being found in the
rocks. And perhaps, further, the rocks that contained those
relics had themselves been precipitated out of a universal
Flood-created sea.
Burnet tried to figure out where enough water to cover the
mountains could have come from. There wasn't enough water
in the oceans - even forty days and nights of rain would add
only a metaphorical drop - and so he concluded that there must
have been more oceans lying deep underground, a worldwide
layer of water under Earth's original crust. This gave him the
clue that allowed him to construct his cosmology.
Burnet's primordial universe was a jumble of particles from
which Earth coalesced in a smooth series of concentric layers,
sorted by density. The body of the planet contained a vast layer
of water. Earth's original crust, lying over the water, was perfect,
its surface featureless and smooth: 'no Rocks nor Mountains,
no hollow Caves, nor gaping Channels, but even and uniform
 DEPOSITION 53
all over'. Rivers flowed from the poles to the tropics, where they
dissipated. Earth's axis had no tilt, so there were no seasons.
Eden, placed at a mid-latitude, enjoyed perpetual spring, and
everybody lived to nine hundred years or more.
The Flood occurred when this original crust cracked open.
As the Bible tells us, the 'fountains of the great deep' erupted.
The unfortunate planet tipped over (perhaps pushed by angels,
as in Milton's Paradise Lost), and the endless spring was lost.
In these unpleasant conditions lifespans shrivelled to a mere
three score years and ten. The Earth's current surface is
nothing but a ruin of what went before the Flood. The ocean
basins are gaping holes, the mountains upturned fragments of
the old Edenic crust. Since then geological processes have only
served further to erode this global wreck. Only six thousand
years old, Earth has already fallen into old age.
But these unhappy times won't last forever. In future ages a
new deluge will come - but this time a deluge of fire, sparked
by volcanic torches and fed by huge underground reservoirs of
air. (Britain's coal reserves will help it burn particularly brightly,
Burnet adds on a cheery patriotic note.) This conflagration will
consume the Earth, mobilising its particles into a new period
of chaos. But these particles will settle out once more into a
new perfection, with concentric layers sorted by density. On
an Earth made perfect again, Christ will reign for a thousand
years. Finally, after a final battle against the forces of evil, the
saints will ascend. The Earth, abandoned, will become a star.
In the telling, Burnet showed a mastery of divine special
effects: 'Upon this chaos rode the distressed ark, that bore the
small remains of mankind. No sea was ever so tumultuous as
this ... The ark was really carried to the tops of the highest
mountains, and into the places of the clouds, and thrown
down again into the deepest gulfs.' Burnet's account was a
popular hit: he was the Cecil B. de Mille of Mosaic geology.
We have to embrace the progress of understanding, but I
think we are allowed to mourn the loss of such magnificent
stories. That's not to say, however, that the story of the Earth
as we know it today doesn't contain its own drama. Indeed, it
even exhibits strange echoes of Burnet's busy cataclysms.
Now we believe that the Earth was indeed formed from a
chaotic cloud, a lenticular swarm of dust and gas that orbited
54 AGES IN CHAOS

the young sun. And we do believe that the world's surface will
be destroyed by fire - in- the far future of a billion years or
more, when the ageing sun will swell into a 'red giant', its
surface creeping like a crimson tide past the inner planets* at
last breaking upon the orbit of the Earth. Today we no longer
imagine that Earth will become a star, but it will be destroyed
by one.
Burnet's work left Hutton unsatisfied, however, for all its
drama. Without a solid logical foundation - without some way
for Burnet to show how he had constructed his vision of the
past, which after all we cannot observe directly - it remained
just a story, if a marvellous one. Hutton would write that 'it
surely cannot be considered in any other light than as a dream,
formed upon a poetic fiction of a golden age.'

More theological system-builders followed Burnet. But

baffling problems remained.
The notion that the rocks had been deposited out of a
universal ocean made a certain sense. It could even explain the
strata to be observed in many of the rocks, if the particles in
the ocean were deposited out in an orderly way.
But the strata were not always found stacked in neat layers.
Sometimes - in Scotland, usually, in fact - they were uplifted,
broken and folded. They can even be found folded back on
themselves altogether. And then there were the peculiarities
to be found within the strata, like Hutton's flint nodules, and
veins of minerals and basalt that cut across the strata of other
rocks. It was hard to imagine any sequence of events in a
drying ocean that could have caused such anomalies.
And then there was time.
This troubled Burnet himself. All the marvellous events of
the Creation seemed to Burnet to require rather more than the
standard six days of the Genesis story to achieve. Perhaps, he
mused, the six days were allegorical. He conducted a corres­
pondence with Newton over this, but Newton preferred the
idea that there really had been six days, but that the early
'days' had been of indeterminate length.
If the age of the Earth was in question, however, perhaps it
would be possible, not just to deduce it from the Bible - but to
measure it.
 DEPOSITION 55
Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon had a colourful life. A
Frenchman, he was born into riches, and never lost the taste
for the good life. Buffon was, however, a dutiful scholar, and
the works of Newton made a profound impression on him, as
on so many others. In 1734, aged twenty-six, he was elected to
Paris's Academy of Sciences, and five years later became
director of the Jardin du Roi - the Garden of the King, a
botanical garden that became one of France's leading scientific
institutions.
In a quest for scientific glory, Buffon turned his formidable
energies on the question of Earth's origins. Buffon was
different from many contemporary thinkers in that he rejected
the Bible story. Newton's laws had been sufficient to explain
the motion of the planets and the oscillation of the tides;
perhaps they could be applied to the history of the world itself.
Buffon formulated a mighty new theory. He proposed that an
immense comet had splashed into the sun: the impact had
thrown off a great gout of molten material that had coalesced
into the planets.
It was just another 'poetic fiction' - but Buffon used these
ideas to produce an estimate of the age of the Earth. A globe of
iron an inch in diameter would cool from red-hot to room tem­
perature in an hour, larger globes longer. So how long would it
take to cool a globe of iron the size of the Earth? Buffon's
result, worked out from experimentation and calculation, was
startling: some 74,000 years - much longer than the Ussher
chronology.
Buffon's work created a great furore, of course. The
theologians at the Sorbonne condemned him, and Buffon
dutifully retracted. But he wasn't sincere: 'It is better to be
humble than hanged.'
In any case, privately Buffon had begun to believe that even
74,000 years was still too short. He continued with private
experiments, and came up with new estimates of Earth's age:
a million years, three million, ten million. He didn't publish
such numbers, not so much from fear of the religious
authorities - by now he was too old to care - but because he
thought the public wasn't ready for them: 'Why does the
human mind seem to lose itself in the length of time?'
Six thousand years, seventy-four thousand, a million years,
56 AGES IN CHAOS

ten million ... The predictions .of Newtonian natural law and
the evidence of the rocks - including such awkward anomalies
as Leonardo's fossils and Hutton's flints in sandstone - were
becoming increasingly difficult to marry to the Ussher
chronology. But there was no alternative theoretical frame­
work to deal with these issues, no other way to think. If the
world hadn't been created as the Bible set out, nobody had
much of an idea how it actually had been.
Hutton, distracted by the puzzles of the rocks, was surely
intrigued by this slowly gathering debate - but he had no time
to take part in it, for once again his young life was to be
plunged into turmoil.
 7
'The wandering infidelities
of the heart’
In 1749, having qualified as a doctor at the age of twenty-three,
- Hutton returned to Britain. He lingered in London through
the winter, and then travelled back to Scotland. He would
spend two years in Edinburgh, and the fallout from this time
would affect the rest of his life. For they were years in which
he wrestled with indecision over his future - and in which he
had a disastrous love affair.
Hutton certainly didn't want to be a doctor. He was still
devoted to chemistry, the subject that had drawn him into
medicine in the first place, but he had become cynical about
contemporary medical science - and he didn't have a
physician's nurturing instincts. Much later, his friend Adam
Ferguson would say that 'an attempt to consult him or see him
[over a medical matter] would have been met with a laugh, or
some ludicrous fancy, to turn off the subject.' Besides, the
business of medicine in Edinburgh had been sewn up by a few
long-established practitioners: there was no opening for a
young man without connections, recommendations or track
record - or, as Playfair put it, any of 'that patient and
circumspect activity by which a man pushes himself forward
in the world'. And work as a physician would have made
relentless demands, leaving him little time to pursue
chemistry, geology and other interests.
So Hutton started to explore an alternate path. One of his
old friends, of about his age, was James Davie. Their relation­
ship was based on a common interest in chemistry, and before
Hutton had left Edinburgh for his foreign medical training
they had dabbled with experiments in the production of sal
ammoniac - that is, the salt of ammonia and hydrogen
chloride. In natural form this industrial chemical is a white
crystalline salt. It is used today as an electrolyte (a conducting
fluid) in small electrical cells of the type used in torches and
58 AGES IN CHAOS

radios, and in many cough medicines and cold remedies. In

Hutton's day it was important for dyeing, and for working with
brass and tin. Davie had continued the experiments in
Hutton's absence, and had come up with a way of manufactur­
ing the salt from common fireplace soot, a resource readily
available from the hearths of Edinburgh. Since the salt had
previously been available only as an import from Egypt, this
was an obviously profitable prospect. Hutton and his partner
began to develop a works to manufacture the salt. Davie took
the lead at first, and the factory was established some time
during the 1750s.
It was an unglamorous business. Davie signed a deal to take
all the soot collected by the 'tronmen', the Edinburgh chimney
sweeps. To process the soot, glass spheres about thirty centi­
metres across were filled almost to the brim with the stuff.
Davie obtained the spheres from a glassworks in Prestonpans
run by John Roebuck, who would later partner James Watt. The
spheres were put into a furnace and heated up, with their
mouths outside in the cooler air. The heat drove the sal
ammoniac out of the soot, and the salt would be found to have
collected on the spheres' cooler surfaces around the mouths, in
thick lumps about five centimetres deep. In this way you could
reduce ten kilograms of soot to yield three of sal ammoniac.
It must have given Hutton great satisfaction that his
chemical tinkering, which had deflected his university career
and caused him to lose his job as a legal apprentice, should
now turn up trumps,- his restless mind and mischievous nature
were at last paying dividends. But it would take a while for the
sal ammoniac business to turn a reasonable profit, and Hutton
still had to work for a living. Again he cast around for a new
avenue.
But now his life was devastated by scandal.
Though Hutton struck Playfair as an open character, he was
actually very reticent about his personal life. He never told the
full story of these years, even to his closest friends. But there
are hints of what happened from autobiographical fragments in
his later works, and from his few surviving letters.
The world knew him as a bachelor, but in his letters Hutton
hinted he was trapped in a relationship - and perhaps he was
even married: 'Now I am e'en wedded, and so must endeavour
 DEPOSITION 59
to restrain the wandering infidelities of the heart.' Hutton
seems to have thought the affair had ruined his life, and
became bitter towards women in general, though he himself
seems not to have been without fault: 'I don't let any of the fair
kind of creatures know of my distress it would kittle the
malicious corner of their hearts to hear the afflictions of a
hardened wretch whom they could never make to groan.'
Surely it wasn't Hutton's first love affair. But this one went
sour. What we do know is that it produced a son, born around
1749. Hutton seems to have shut the child out of his life,- he
never told his friends of the boy's existence. But the birth of
the child caused Hutton great distress. He appears to have
been forced out of Edinburgh under duress, presumably
because of the scandal.
He still had to make a living, though. Exiled from the city,
he had just one fall-back position: the two farms bequeathed
him by his father, at Slighhouses and Nether Monynut in
Berwickshire.
James Hutton - a farmer7.

Playfair, knowing nothing of the scandal, would try to

rationalise Hutton's choice: 'We ought ... I think, to look for
the motives that influenced him, in the simplicity of his
character, and the moderation of his views, [rather] than in
external circumstances. To one who, in the maturity of
understanding, has leisure to look around on the various
employments which exercise the skill and industry of man, if
his mind is independent and unambitious, and if he has no
sacrifice to make to vanity or avarice, the profession of a
farmer may seem fairly entitled to a preference above all
others ...'
But this bucolic diagnosis is mistaken. Hutton must have
viewed the prospect with horror. Slighhouses was not exactly
a comfortable estate. It was a small, remote farm that would
be difficult to work, and where a city boy would be isolated,
and starved of entertainment and intellectual companionship.
However, by 1752, three years after completing his medical
degree, Hutton decided at last that he had no choice.
It wasn't necessarily a bad time to become a farmer: Scottish
agriculture was about to undergo a revolution.
6o AGES IN CHAOS

In the harsh climate of the early years of the Union, many

Scottish gentry had become embarrassed by the comparison
between their poor farms and their English counterparts. So in
172,3, three hundred patriotic types formed the Honourable
Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture. The
Improvers experimented with foreign techniques of crop
rotation and enclosures, new tools, ploughs and milling
machinery, and they reaped their rewards in increased yields
and profits. Cattle began to be moved on drove-roads that
spanned the Highlands, and the cultivation of the potato in the
Lowlands would provide a reliable diet for the ordinary folk for
the next hundred years.
Eventually Scotland's farms would become models of
agricultural science, admired and copied worldwide; the
Improvers' movement was one of the first flowerings of the
great Scottish Enlightenment that would characterise the rest
of the eighteenth century. Of course there were human costs:
common pastures were fenced off, small farms combined into
larger holdings, and unwanted tenants evicted. However,
resistance was dispirited and disorganised, and ended with the
transportation of some of its leaders.
Hutton was aware of the new techniques. 'It was, I believe,'
he would write, 'by reading the ingenious Mr [Jethro] Tull at an
early period of my life that I acquired a taste for agriculture.'
Besides, he was determined to put off the dread prospect of
actually breaking the soil as long as possible. Having been
thrown out of Edinburgh, Hutton didn't make immediately for
his farms, but travelled south, on the not unreasonable pretext
of studying a little agricultural science first.
In Edinburgh he had become acquainted with a Norfolk
gentleman called John Manning. At the time, Norfolk led the
country in improved methods of agriculture: the land there
had been enclosed, and a fourfold rotation system, of roots,
barley, clover and wheat, had led to vastly better yields of both
animals and crops. So for a time Hutton stayed with Manning's
father in Yarmouth. Later he stayed with another gentleman
farmer, John Dybold of Belton, who served as 'both his
landlord and instructor'. Hutton lived in the farmer's house,
and was put to work, enjoying many 'practical lessons in
husbandry'.
 DEPOSITION 6l
Hutton seems to have enjoyed Norfolk. Playfair wrote, The
simple and plain character of the society with which [Hutton]
mingled, suited well with his own, and the peasants of Norfolk
would find nothing in the stranger to set them at a distance
from him ... There was accordingly no period in his life to
which he more frequently alluded, in conversation with his
friends,- often describing, with singular vivacity, the rural
sports and little adventures, which, in the intervals of labour,
formed the amusement of their society.'
After a year with Dybold, Hutton moved to central Suffolk,
where he compared farming on heavy land with techniques
suitable for the light Norfolk soils. He made studies of
ploughing, and of dairying and butter manufacture.
And during these two East Anglian years, Hutton explored.

He made many journeys - mostly on foot - to different parts of

England. He visited Northumberland, Yorkshire, Derbyshire,
Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and the Isle of Wight. These trips
were made primarily to study agricultural techniques, but by
this time Hutton had also begun to study geology and
mineralogy in a more serious way.
Playfair imagined that he took up the subject more deeply in
order to 'amuse himself on the road'. If you were a geologist,
there was, after all, always something to see, and on horseback
or on foot Hutton was immersed in the countryside. Perhaps,
too, as with chemistry, he was attracted by geology's tactile
immediacy: you could touch the rocks, turn them over,
explore them with your hands as well as your mind.
Soon he started to direct his journeys to interesting
geological features, as well as to agricultural objectives.
Hutton would later boast that he could tell you where a piece
of gravel had come from anywhere on the eastern side of
Britain.
He followed, as he would write in 1770, the 'ridge of
indurated chalk that runs east and west thro' the Isle of Wight,
the Needles are portions of this remaining still undemolished
by the waves, it seems to be continued, under the sea, west
into the opposite coast where needles are also formed of it, and
I travelled upon the top of this ridge from Corfe Castle to
Weymouth.' And as Hutton explored these soft young rocks of
62 AGES IN CHAOS

southern England - so different-from the ancient and heavily

glaciated rocks of Scotland - what he saw struck him greatly.
Playfair, later desiring to 'trace the progress of an author's
mind in the formation of a system where so many new and
enlarged views of nature occur', gives us some hints of
Hutton's thinking at this point in his life. 'It appears that ...
[the proposition that] a vast proportion of the present rocks is
composed of materials afforded by the destruction of bodies
animal, vegetable and mineral, of more ancient formation, is
the first conclusion that he drew from his observations. The
second seems to have been that all the present rocks are
without exception going to decay, and their materials
descending into the ocean. These two propositions, which are
the extreme points, as it were, of his system, appear, as to the
order in which they became known, to precede all the rest.'
At Yarmouth, Hutton saw a spectacular example of Earth's
destructive forces at work. Where the River Yare meets the
North Sea, Hutton watched a flood carry away part of the land,
and storms batter the coast. Hutton, intrigued, sought out
more examples of erosion, like the Needles of the Isle of
Wight. Erosion was everywhere shaping the world, and it was
relentless.
Hutton knew about the practical implications of erosion, of
course. The Norfolk farmers stressed the dangers of soil
erosion and depletion, and how to counter it with crop
rotation, good fertiliser and the right kind of drainage ditches.
But as a trainee farmer he must also have observed that erosion
isn't always a bad thing. All rocks are continually eroding
away, as wind and water, heat and frost work at them. But then
nothing can live on bare rock. Erosion might be destructive -
but it is actually necessary, to make the soil that is the
substrate of all life. It was a paradox.
And if the land was being destroyed, Hutton also noticed
how much of the rock exposed along the Yarmouth coast
showed evidence of recent creation. Some sandstones looked
just like tightly packed sand - it was just that the grains had
been somehow cemented together - and other rocks were full
of fossil shells that had obviously once, and comparatively
recently, been under the sea. 'Dr Hutton,' Playfair would write,
'... insists much on the perfect agreement of the structure of
 DEPOSITION 63
the beds of grit and sandstone, with that of the banks of
unconsolidated sand now formed on our shores, and shews
that these bodies differ from one another in nothing but their
compactness and induration.' In a way this was an application
of Steno's principle of similarity.
If river and rain and ocean could destroy rocks, there were
clearly forces working in the world that could make them
again, and even lift them out of the oceans where they were
formed. But though the young science of geology might be the
'handmaiden of the Bible', this creativity had nothing to do
with scripture. The Bible does describe erosion: Isaiah tells
how 'every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and
hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough places plain.' But scripture contains no hint of
how the land might be restored. So erosion is a one-way street
towards destruction and uniformity. Whatever world-building
system you adopted, if you accepted the Bible story the world
must be young, because otherwise erosion would already have
destroyed all its topography. In studying sandstone, however,
Hutton had clearly perceived that creative forces did exist -
even if the Bible didn't say so.
In the spring of 1754, Hutton decided to visit the Low
Countries once more, as that was where most of the recent
English innovations in agriculture had sprung from. So he set
out from Rotterdam and travelled through Holland, Brabant,
Flanders and Picardy. He was impressed with what he saw, but
made a comparison flattering to England: 'Had I doubted of
it before I set out,' he wrote, 'I should have returned fully
convinced that they are good husbandmen in Norfolk.'
He took the chance to study again the chalk and sandstone
formations he had first noticed during his days as a medical
student. Chalk was relevant to his farming studies, because it
was used as fertiliser throughout southern England. But here
was another puzzle. Chalk was a classic sedimentary rock,
clearly created from the detritus of earlier erosion, and from
the bodies of sea animals: 'That which renders the original of
our land clear and evident,' he would write in 1785, 'is the
immense quantities of calcareous bodies which had belonged
to animals, and the intimate connection of these masses of
animal production with the other strata of the land.' Yet this
64 AGES IN CHAOS

new rock, so obviously created under the sea, was essential for
life.
So erosion destroyed rock, unknown forces created it, and in
the midst of all this the soil necessary to support life w'As
created. It was all fascinating - but not explained by any
geological theory then extant - and certainly, to Hutton's
mind, none of it fitted the Bible's traditional picture of a world
in decay. All these observations swirled in his mind, pieces of
a puzzle that lacked any obvious key.
This interval in England and Holland was a relatively happy
time for Hutton, full of studying, socialising, travelling and
geologising. Perhaps it was a welcome break from the
hothouse crisis he had left behind in Edinburgh. But by the
summer of 1754, after two years away from home, he couldn't
put off the black day any longer. It was time to get his hands
dirty.
 8
‘A cursed country where one has to
shape everything out of a block’
The land was wild and uncultivated, just open fields that
backed on to sheep country. Stones had to be split and hauled
away before Hutton could work the soil at all. Much of the farm
was sculpted into long ridges intended to help drainage, but
whose principal effect was to wash away the topsoil. Hutton
had to flatten the old ridges, and dig new drainage ditches.
It was slow, back-breaking, exhausting work. Hutton found
it hard even to find tools and skilled tradesmen. 'Talk of
moving mountains, I can tell you, I'm obliged to use a great
clumsy wooden slipe & drag the whinstone through the rough
land (sore against their will) ... my houses are not a foot more
forward than the day I came to this country.' He was stranded
in 'a cursed country where one has to shape everything out of
a block & to block everything out of a rock ... I find myself
already more than half transformed into a brute.'
But he persevered.

Hutton's farms are six kilometres north of Duns in

Berwickshire, about sixty kilometres south-east of Edinburgh.
Slighhouses had been bought by Hutton's great-uncle John in
1713. John sold it to three of his nephews, including Hutton's
father William,- one of the brothers died, and William bought
out the third. Meanwhile William had bought Nether
Monynut outright in 1710. ('Nether' means 'lower'. There is
also a Middle Monynut and an Upper Monynut, making a
string of holdings along the Monynut Waters which tumble
down from the Lammermuirs.) In 1760, Hutton would have to
go through a legal procedure to re-establish his ownership of
the farms.
To get to Slighhouses you travel south from Dunbar through
the arable country of the Lammermuir Hills. Today this is a
gently rolling landscape of dry stone walls, sheep and cattle.
66 AGES IN CHAOS

Slighhouses itself is some hundred metres above sea level.

To the east the land falls away, affording a long and pleasing
view towards the Tweed valley, while to the west the land
rises towards the Lammermuirs. Slighhouses is unremarkable
and mostly modern, though its buildings have eighteenth­
century rooms built onto an older core - perhaps
improvements made by Hutton. Meanwhile Slighhouses'
sister farm, Nether Monynut, is two hundred metres higher,
and the soil is thick and stony. It isn't clear what use Hutton
made of the hill farm, but perhaps his father had used it as a
source of stock for his arable land.
It is difficult to imagine how it must have been when
Hutton first arrived here, and how he must have felt about
his sour personal circumstances. But despite the unpromising
location, Hutton was determined to apply the modern
methods he had learned in the south, and make a success of
his farming. He probably applied a crop-rotation system,
growing wheat in the first year of the cycle, then turnips, and
finally barley, undersown with grasses and clover to provide
pasture for the following year. He kept cattle and probably
sheep.
His most notorious innovation was to import modern
ploughs: light and small, and drawn by only two horses. Adam
Ferguson would write that in Norfolk Hutton 'purchased a
plough, hired a ploughman, and brought both on the
post-chaise with him to Berwickshire. The neighbours were
diverted with this assortment of company and baggage, and no
less with the attempt which followed, to plough with a pair
of horses without a driver.' This vignette is probably not
completely accurate,- Hutton brought several ploughs with
him from East Anglia, and when he was unable to find a local
willing to learn how to use them, he was forced to go back to
Norfolk to persuade an experienced ploughman to come to
Scotland.
Starved of companionship, Hutton took a certain
sentimental pride in the cattle under his care, especially in the
ancient cycle of birth and death. He wrote to his friends, 'Give
me joy, this day is born into my family a male child - and the
mother is in a fair way of recovery - O if the ladies were but
capable of loving us men with half the affection that I have
 DEPOSITION 67
towards the cows and calfi.es that happen to be under my
nurture and admonition, what a happy world we should have!'
He learned to make butter with cream that had been scalded
to get rid of the taste of turnip, and he became something of an
expert on cheeses.
Nonetheless, living alone, Hutton was soon lonely, bored
and depressed: 'This squeamish homebred stomach of mine
isn't truly reconciled to the bitter pill of disappointment.'
Despite his social success in East Anglia, the life of the
Berwickshire rustics was too uncouth for his tastes: 'They
had me at a feast of Baal where was a sow an honest sow
roasted i' the guts so we had a dish of surprised pig and I did
eat thereof, they led me up into the dance, but I will enter
no more into their high places.' He missed city life, and tried
to persuade his friends to visit him. Later, he would write
of his loneliness during a solo geological tour: he would
'walk about 81 enquire to prevent hanging himself through
the day and then at night he writes a bit and drinks a sup of
hot toddy.'
His neighbours were a comfort, however. During his time in
Edinburgh Hutton had met Sir John Hall of Dunglass. Hall,
fifteen years older than Hutton, was a man 'of ingenuity and
taste for science, and also much conversant with the manage­
ment of country affairs'. Dunglass is only some thirteen
kilometres from Slighhouses, and Hall and Hutton would
remain close friends. The friendship would continue to the
next generation: Hall's son James would accompany Hutton on
that fateful trip to Siccar Point three decades later.
David Hume's older brother James was another of the
agricultural Improvers. The Hume family home was at
Ninewells, no more than five kilometres from Slighhouses, and
it is possible that Hutton made David Hume's acquaintance
during this period.
The Clerks remained companions too. As the seventh of his
father's sons, Hutton's old friend from medical school, John
Clerk of Eldin, was never wealthy. In 1762, he purchased a
small coalfield from the Marquis of Lothian. To raise the
money he took out bank loans, and received help from 'our
most benevolent and worthy friend Doctor Hutton'. Playfair
described Hutton as always 'humane and charitable' to his
68 AGES IN CHAOS

friends: 'He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak

properly, he set on it no more than its true value.' Unable to
afford a manager, Clerk had to direct the mining operations
himself - and the extensive knowledge of sedimentary rocks
and their structure he acquired must have been of great
interest to Hutton.
The geology, indeed, was always a consolation.

In 1764, after ten years at Slighhouses, Hutton took a break

from his farming. He had remained a bachelor, and probably
left his farm in the hands of his Norfolk ploughman while he
set off with George Clerk-Maxwell to tour the Highlands.
George - later Sir George, fourth Baronet of Penicuik - had
added 'Maxwell' to his name after marrying his cousin
Dorothea Clerk-Maxwell. He had developed interests in
mining, manufacturing and agriculture, and wrote learned
pamphlets on such subjects as fisheries and ploughing. Hutton
had become great friends with Clerk-Maxwell, of whom
Playfair said, 'a gentleman distinguished by his abilities and
worth, with whom Dr Hutton had the happiness to live in
habits of the most intimate friendship'. Clerk-Maxwell was
the first, but not the last, of the Clerk brothers to accompany
Hutton on significant excursions into the field.
Hutton and Clerk-Maxwell travelled from Crieff, near Perth,
over the Grampians to Dalwhinnie. They made their way to
the Great Glen, travelling from Fort Augustus along the shore
of Loch Ness to Inverness. Then they crossed to Aberdeen and
travelled down Scotland's east coast, eventually heading back
towards Edinburgh.
Hutton was by now in his late thirties, and this tour was
gruelling, if rewarding. But he could not have ignored the fact
that he was travelling through a land effectively under military
occupation.
After the immediate terror that had accompanied the
putting-down of the 'Forty-Five, the clan system was
attacked with the law. The powers of the chiefs were
removed, and prohibitions were imposed against the
carrying of weapons of war. Even Highland dress and the
Gaelic language were banned. Meanwhile a rigorous martial
control was enforced throughout the Highlands. Great
 DEPOSITION 69
military highways had been driven across the central massif,
incidentally providing comfortable routes for Hutton and
Clerk-Maxwell. A formidable artillery fortress was built at
Fort George, east of Inverness. This huge fort is still in use
as a military base today; it is a monument to the Hanoverian
government's determination that the Highlands would
never rise again.
All this was the beginning of the process that would lead to
the Clearances, a devastating transformation that would take
a century to complete, with the people of the glens being
replaced by vast herds of sheep - often owned by the old clan
chiefs, in a final betrayal of their 'families'. The Clearances
were so thorough that during the Russian war of the 1850s -
more than a century after the departure of the Bonnie Prince -
when the call came to the Highlands to raise regiments to
replace those destroyed at Balaclava and elsewhere, barely a
platoon could be raised: 'Since you have preferred sheep to
men,' growled a local, 'let sheep defend you.'
Hutton was the son of a merchant, and now a gentleman­
farmer. Most Lowlanders (with honourable exceptions, such as
David Hume) had simply been relieved that the disaster of the
'Forty-Five had been averted, and the clans controlled. Indeed
George Clerk-Maxwell was Commissioner for the Forfeited
and Annexed Estates: Clerk-Maxwell's own purpose on this
Highland tour was to gather information on the agricultural
and mineralogical potential of lands forfeited by nobles who
had supported Bonnie Prince Charlie. In common with most of
his class, Hutton probably had little sympathy for the suffering
of the 'wyld men' he glimpsed in the glens.
Besides, Hutton's interest was in the rocks, not the people.
He noticed Old Red Sandstone exposed at the coast at
Caithness. At the Firth of Cromarty he saw 'masses ... of shells
in banks many feet above the level of the present sea mark', a
puzzle to match Leonardo's mountain-top oyster shells. He
saw examples of rocks that would inform his later thinking,
including granite on the coast near Aberdeen, and basalt, a
volcanic rock that he saw at Crieff and elsewhere, apparently
injected in great veins into pre-existing strata.
Whereas Hutton's early tours had been designed primarily to
gather agricultural information, with geology as something of
70 AGES IN CHAOS

a hobby, by now geology had replaced agriculture as his

principal interest - though he did call on a Captain Lockhart of
Balnagown, reputedly the best farmer in the country, to advise
him to use sea shells as fertiliser. Rather than trawling for data
at random, Hutton was already focusing his geologising on
gathering specific information. He had begun to compile notes
on his observations and reflections.
He had also begun a collection of geological specimens,
some of which he collected himself, but others of which he
acquired from a growing network of fellow enthusiasts. Not all
these collectors were of high quality: Hutton would write in
about 1770 of how he had commissioned 'gentlemen of my
acquaintance in different parts of the country to send me
specimens of their limestones at hazard, for they cannot
choose proper specimens,- this I have done to several parts, but
hitherto either received nothing at all or nothing worth your
looking at,- and the collecting them myself is a work of time
and precarious.'
He would eventually call his specimens 'God's Books' - and,
Adam Ferguson would say, he 'treated the books of men with
comparative neglect'. He did consume geological facts,
though, which he obtained by devouring books of travel and
description. In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at
first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological
methods of the future.
Hutton's geological expertise eventually became highly
developed. In letters written around 1770 to John Strange - a
friend of a friend, and a fellow student of the rocks - Hutton
gave a long and detailed description of the geology of Scotland,
as he had learned it: 'The strata in this country are much more
irregular and mixed with other masses, in which no form of
strata is to be observed, than what I have observed in England,
from whence I except Cornwall and Wales, in neither of which
I have been. We have no chalk in Scotland, so far as I can learn;
I saw a little limestone mixed in flint, that in some measure
imitated it, a little south of Dunrobin Castle.' And so on.
Hutton's descriptions are precise, substantially correct, and
clearly based on first-hand study.
It was a remarkable achievement. When he began to explore
the geology of his native land, Hutton had far less prior
 DEPOSITION 71
knowledge of it than Neil Armstrong had of the Moon when
he first stepped out of his Apollo lander. Eventually, more or
less self-taught, and after years of careful observation, Hutton
would build up a synthesis of the distribution and charac­
teristics of many of Britain's principal rock formations, which
in broad outline still stands up today.
Hutton was incidentally remarkably friendly and open to
Strange, a man he had never even met: 'There is our
Warehouse - look about you; please your own fancy; I shall
hand you down any piece of stuff you desire.' To Hutton, like
others of the Enlightenment generations, knowledge was
something to share. As in much of Hutton's life, there is a
sense of community, of mutual support. Naturalist Thomas
Pennant, writing to another geologist in 1769, described
Hutton himself as 'the greatest enthusiast I ever met in your
way; very lively, very ingenious'.
Hutton had also developed a great enthusiasm for his native
Scotland, despite the rigours of such tours. He would say to
Strange, 'I will venture to say that whatever satisfaction you
may have received in your examinations of England, could
your health permit you to visit this Country, it would also
afford further confirmation,- but though it should afford you
many interesting facts, I must, in justice, warn you to expect
to meet with greater stumbling blocks,- not only in respect to
the accommodation of your person (which a philosopher in
health, at least, could get over or go round) but also with regard
to the penetration of your spirit; the first may deter an invalid,
the second will incite a true Philosopher.'
After the tour, though, Hutton had to return to the solitude
of the farm. As he would write to Clerk-Maxwell ten years
later, 'If there is to be an excess I think I would choose it to lie
upon the side of quietness & silence only that we shall see
enough of it in the grave before the resurrection begins
mayhap, so let us speak a little before we lie down.'

Hutton persevered with his farming, and slowly his "situation

improved. His Norfolk plough transformed the land. As Adam
Ferguson noted, 'The joke [of his Norfolk plough] has become
serious, and is now the general practice from one end of
Scotland to the other.' The farm, once a 'very wild and
72 AGES IN CHAOS

uncultivated piece of land', had a 'degree of neatness and

garden-like culture, which in farming had not been seen
before. Persons of every description came from every quarter
to gratify their intellectual curiosity, as well as to get
information.' This description was given after Hutton's death
by a writer and advocate called Robert Forsyth, as a prelude to
a harsh attack on Hutton's geological theories.
Inspired by the success of his modern farming methods,
Hutton began his own scientific studies of agriculture. To
investigate the effects of light and heat on growing plants, he
tried such experiments as growing radishes and carrots in the
dark. He explored the effects of climate and soil fertility on the
quality and quantity of his seeds. He experimented with salt,
seaweed, dung and even coal ash as fertilizers. He discussed
these studies with friends in Edinburgh, and would visit the
farms of other Improvers, sometimes in the company of his
friend Dr James Russel, who would become another lifelong
companion.
Hutton also began a detailed series of studies of the weather,
concerned with how climate, especially temperature, affected
plant growth. This became a lifelong project. Even back in East
Anglia he had taken the temperature of springs along the
coast, trying to establish a relationship between latitude and
temperature. Now, at Slighhouses, he could be seen wetting
thermometer bulbs and holding them up to the east wind, to
see how evaporation caused a drop in temperature.
Hutton's experiences as a farmer greatly deepened and
enriched his understanding of the natural world. Harking back
to his medical studies, when he had been struck by the
analogies between the human body and the body of the Earth,
he tried to study the way dynamic forces - notably light, heat
and the chemistry of the soil - operated together to support
life. He was becoming fascinated by what we would today call
holistic properties: how the world as a whole operated. He
came to feel that most naturalists paid too much attention to
classification and analysis, as if they were trying to break
down the natural world into fragments.
Such reflections, laid over the strata of experience and
philosophy in Hutton's still young mind, were already
consolidating into a startling new geological insight - an
 DEPOSITION 73
insight that would shape the rest of his life, and ultimately the
future of geology itself.
In the end, it came out of a crisis of faith.
 9
'The Work of Infinite
Power and Wisdom"
In the solitude of his farmhouse, Hutton brooded over the
nature of God.
The doubts planted by Maclaurin's Deist lectures had
deepened. The simple Christian beliefs with which he had
grown up had long dissipated: 'There is nothing of the
Christian left about me except some practice of prayer and
piety.' But he seemed to have been searching for a new
certainty: 'Faith, faith of all things is what I want most,' he
wrote. 'I ha'nt a single grain of it to do me any good.'
By now Maclaurin's teaching of the essential beneficence of
God and the perfection of His natural law seemed to accord
more deeply than traditional teachings with Hutton's
experience of the real world. After all, according to
contemporary readings of scripture, the Earth was nothing but
a ruin, a relic of a better time: Hutton would write,
'Philosophers observing an apparent disorder and confusion in
the solid parts of this globe, have been led to conclude, that
there formerly existed a more regular and uniform state, in the
constitution of this Earth; that there had happened some
destructive change; and that the original structure of the Earth
had been broken and disturbed by some violent operation,
whether natural, or from a supernatural cause.' Thus Burnet's
Earth had been created perfect, but had, steadily or
spectacularly, decayed ever since: even such beautiful features
as Alpine mountains were just the ruins of an original Edenic
landscape.
But Hutton himself had coaxed crops from the ground with
his own fingers; he himself had turned an unpromising piece
of hillside into a productive farm. Earth, it seemed to him, was
not a wreck, but was generous and bountiful.
Besides, why would God purposely create a world that
instantly fell into ruin? Did Genesis not say of the creation,
 DEPOSITION 75
'And God saw that it was good'? What was good about a
wreck? Wasn't it more likely that God would make a world
that was in fact perfect, and stayed that way? And if God made
the world, what did He make it for7.
Hutton gradually became convinced that he needed to
understand the divine design of the Earth. In doing so he
constructed a new and crucially important theory that would
cement his own reputation and place in history, and has
shaped geology ever since. And, it seems, he found new faith.

Hutton would not publish his theory until the 1780s, but he
had formulated his key ideas much earlier - possibly by 1760,
when he was just thirty-four.
Playfair regretted the fact that even by the time of his
biography, 1803, Hutton's papers 'do not afford so much
information as might be wished for'. But Playfair refers to
'sketches' of an essay on 'The Natural History of the World'
that were evidently written around 1760. Hutton's Edinburgh
friend Joseph Black would, in 1787, send an abstract of
Hutton's theory to an interested Russian princess, noting, 'Dr
Hutton had found this system or the principal parts of it more
than twenty years ago and he has found reason to be more and
more confirmed in it by his study of [rocks] ever since that
time.' So Black also puts the date of the theory's formulation
at before 1767.
Hutton's 1760s sketch of his theory has not survived, but
given Playfair's account, Hutton's own words of his first
formal presentation of the theory, and what we know of
Hutton's experience, I think we can reconstruct the pattern of
his thinking at the time with reasonable reliability.
The Earth - like a human body - is a messy object. The
evidence for divine design is much more easily visible in the
sky above us, in the clean motions of the heavenly bodies. As
Aristotle himself observed, 'Order and definiteness are much
more plainly manifest in the celestial bodies than in our frame,-
while change and chance are characteristic of the perishable
things of Earth.'
But if Earth has a purpose, what is it? Surely, Hutton decided
at last, a perfect world-machine could have no higher purpose
than to sustain life.
76 AGES IN CHAOS

Fine - but if Earth is a life-support machine, at first glance it

is a very imperfect one. Slowly, Hutton began to formulate
what Stephen Jay Gould has called 'the paradox of the soil'.
For life, soil is everything, the substrate of existence. Wf
couldn't live on a ball of rock: 'A solid body of land could not
have answered the purpose of a habitable world,' Hutton
would write in 1785, 'for a soil is necessary to the growth of
plants.' That is why (according to Hutton's developing
argument) erosion works on the surface of the world - to make
soil out of rock. 'A soil is nothing but the materials collected
from the destruction of the solid land ... Therefore, the surface
of this land, inhabited by man, and covered with plants and
animals, is made by nature to decay, in dissolving from that
hard and compact state in which it is found below the soil' (my
emphasis).
Erosion doesn't stop, however, when the soil is created.
Because of erosion, as the Norfolk farmers had taught Hutton,
the soil itself is washed away: the process that made the soil
ultimately destroys it. Of course, there are more rocks to be
weathered to sand and clay, more soil will be manufactured to
replace what was lost. But erosion continues relentlessly.
Given enough time, erosion will continue until 'the heights of
our land are ... levelled with the shores [and] our fertile plains
are formed from the ruins of the mountains.'
Eventually, if this goes on, the world as an abode of life will
have an end-point: 'If the vegetable soil is thus constantly
removed from the surface of the land, and if its place is thus to
be supplied from the dissolution of the solid Earth, as here
represented, we may perceive an end to this beautiful
machine.' The very process that sustained life seemed doomed
eventually to destroy it: that was the paradox of the soil.
But if this was so, Somebody had made an error: 'If no ...
reproductive power, or reforming operation, after due enquiry,
is to be found in the constitution of this world, we should have
reason to conclude, that the system of this Earth has been
intentionally made imperfect, or has not been the work of
infinite power and wisdom.'
Hutton's key intuition was that perhaps the world did not
suffer only decay: perhaps it also had the capability for repair.
Perhaps the world was like the fields he tended, sustained by
 DEPOSITION 77
his own careful crop rotation and fertilisation. Or perhaps it
could even be compared to the Newtonian cosmos.
Gravitation acts as a restorative force against the planet's
inertia, the two effects together keeping the world on its
life-sustaining orbit around the sun; there might similarly be
some restoring force to balance the processes of geological
decay.
Or perhaps, as Hutton had hinted in the title of his medical
thesis, the Earth could be compared not to a worn-out
machine, but to a human body. We are born, we develop, we
age, we sink into decrepitude and we die: each life is a
narrative of unique and unrepeated events. And, like our
decaying bodies - according to one reading of scripture - Earth
is proceeding from a state of perfection through decay into
lifeless ruin: the Earth's meagre six thousand years are like
humanity's three score years and ten.
But our bodies also exemplify another model of time: the old
pagan idea of a history of unending cycles. Our hearts beat, our
lungs fill and empty, our organs recover from injury and
sickness, the blood in our veins circulates. Was it possible,
then, that something of this could be reflected in the
beneficent Earth?
So, drawing on his varied background and starting from first
principles - that the final cause of the Earth is to sustain life -
Hutton deduced that it must have some mechanism of repair
from erosion, just as Harvey had once deduced the existence
of capillaries in the body, then undetected, to complete his
model of blood's circulation. The task now was to find that
mechanism: 'This is the view in which we are now to examine
the globe,- to see if there be, in the constitution of this world,
a reproductive operation, by which a ruined constitution may
be again repaired, and a duration or stability thus procured to
the machine, considered as a world sustaining plants and
animals.'
In his geological observations of sedimentary rocks, Hutton
had glimpsed just such a mechanism. He had compared the
gravel and sand produced by erosion with the visible
components of sedimentary rocks. They looked identical (save
that the rocks had been cemented together by some
mechanism he had yet to understand). Sedimentary rocks, then,
78 AGES IN CHAOS

were formed from the erosion- of some previous landscape,

whose rubble had been compressed and made into new rock.
And this must have happened under the sea. 'We find the
marks of marine animals in the most solid parts of the Eart^i,
consequently, those solid parts have been formed after the
ocean was inhabited by those animals, which are proper to
that fluid medium.'
That couldn't be the whole story, however. If the land was
washed away, even if the debris was consolidated into rock on
the sea bed, the Earth would soon be worn flat: 'We would thus
have a spheroid of water, with granite rocks and islands
scattered here and there.' Somehow the new rocks formed
from the destruction of the old must be raised above the
surface of the water. It had to be this way, if Earth was to stay
habitable - and perhaps Hutton, exploring the twisted, ancient
rocks of the Scottish Highlands, had wondered about the
mighty forces that could have produced such distorted
elevations.
This was Hutton's picture, then: rocks decayed through
erosion, the rubble was consolidated into new rocks, and then
somehow uplifted to make new lands - erosion, deposition,
consolidation, uplift. And cupped in the heart of this immense
rocky machine, the priceless soil that sustained life was subtly
created.
Thus, arguing from final causes, Hutton had resolved the
paradox of the soil, and arrived at a startlingly new view of the
Earth and its operations. His nascent theory of the Earth was a
synthesis of all his experience - the Deistic teachings of
Maclaurin, his microcosmic analogies between the planets and
the Earth and the human body, the benevolence he saw in
nature as a farmer. His design arguments, so alien to modern
thinking, had proved essential, for they had provided the
framework that enabled him to consolidate his puzzling
observations and construct his hypothesis.
Perhaps he had been hungry to find some such vision.
Throughout his life he had been inquisitive, scientifically
restless. He had, after all, studied under the great Maclaurin,
and at Europe's leading centre for medicine; he must have felt
as if his brain was rotting away, stuck out here on the farm.
Now, in the yawning chasm between the reality of Earth as he
 DEPOSITION 79
had experienced it and the accepted theories, he felt he might
have found a great intellectual contribution of his own, a
unique vision. And stranded in a very imperfect world - a
world in which his schooling was disrupted by the posturing of
a prince, and in which his complex personal problems forced
him to grub at the ground to make a living - perhaps a deep
longing was planted in Hutton's mind to find an order in the
mechanisms of the Earth comparable to that which Newton
has found in the heavens.
Whatever the motives, it was a beautiful vision. With his
'series of great natural revolutions in the conditions of the
Earth's surface', as Playfair described it, Hutton had made the
world the mirror of the Newtonian sky. But, despite our
retrospective framing of Hutton as if he was a man of our
own time, it was not a modern scientific hypothesis; it was
hardly possible that it could have been. Hutton's theory of
the Earth was an argument about the nature of God. And
Hutton must have known that a vision, however beautiful,
wasn't enough.

Hutton was a good and successful farmer, but never a rich one.
By the mid-17 60s, his farms were returning a profit, but only a
modest one.
Hutton's situation now changed. He had been elected to a
committee which was to supervise the construction of the
Forth and Clyde canal. He had long taken an interest in the
heated debates over this project, and he must have been
pleased to have found an avenue to exploit his geological
understanding - and an excuse to get involved in the affairs of
the city again. His financial circumstances also began to
improve. The sal ammoniac business had at last, under Davie's
careful stewardship, become seriously profitable.
By about 1765, this business, and perhaps other ventures,
had freed Hutton from the need to earn his living by farming,
and he began to plan a move back to the city. Another motive
for this was his dissatisfaction with his Norfolk ploughman,
whom he hoped to train up as a farm manager: 'As he could
neither manage the business of my farm, nor act properly
under the management of another, I gave up farming,' he
would write. Meanwhile, after thirteen years, perhaps the
8o AGES IN CHAOS

indiscretion that initially drove Hutton out of Edinburgh was

buried sufficiently deeply in the past for him to return without
stigmatisation.
At last, in 1767, aged forty-one, Hutton moved back.^to
Edinburgh. He kept the farms, though, running them under a
series of tenants or managers, and maintained an interest in
their upkeep.
Hutton's years as a farmer had made him. He had been
driven to his farms reluctantly, as a confused and unhappy
young man, but he had made the best of what he had been
given. With pioneering techniques, he had greatly improved the
condition of his land, and his agricultural studies had become
the focal point of his interlocking interests in chemistry,
meteorology, geology and botany. His achievements showed
the quality of his character and his mind.
Hutton never forgot what he had learned on his farm. In
1774. he would write from Bridgnorth to his friend George
Clerk-Maxwell in Edinburgh, reflecting on the agriculture of
the Welsh borders: 'Lord what an inclosed grass country I have
seen: you would not think that corn had been so dear for some
years by the aspect ... no wonder, they are bad at that trade
here, I have seen, more than once, five great waggon horses
yoked endwise like a string of wild geese, - doing what? What
I could not have believed if I had not seen drawing two
harrows, but for what purpose God knows.'
The most important legacy of his farming years, however,
was undoubtedly his geological intuition. As Einstein would
say of relativity, Hutton must have felt it was a theory too
beautiful to be false. But nobody knew about it yet - and
Hutton knew enough about the world of ideas to understand
that if he wanted to join the growing company of respected
thinkers in Enlightenment Edinburgh, if he didn't want to be
dismissed as another spinner of dreams like Burnet, he would
have to establish his theory on firm foundations.
In Hutton's time, however, the organised body of knowledge
we know as modern science had barely begun to be assembled.
Atomic theory, for instance, would not be generally accepted
for another century - in fact, as late as 1870 there were still
attempts to formulate a theory of chemistry without atoms
at all. Nobody understood the nature of heat; it would be a
 DEPOSITION 8i
century before modern thermodynamics was founded. In an
intellectual climate still dominated by the notion that the
Bible was the ultimate source of all wisdom, it wasn't even
clear how to think about the world. Today it has become a
cliché to say of some new scientific discovery - water under
the deserts of Mars, or a new wrinkle in the human genome -
that the scientists will be forced to 'rewrite the textbooks'.
How much harder it was for Hutton in a time when the
textbooks had yet to be written!
As he looked ahead to his new life in Edinburgh's energetic
bustle, Hutton must have begun to understand that in order to
establish his geological theory, he would have to become an
expert on almost everything else as well.
 TWO

Consolidation
 IO
Assemblies of good fellows'

In December 1767, Hutton returned to Edinburgh to live with

his three sisters. From now on he would live permanently in
the city of his birth, and would build a home for himself and
his sisters in a new development called St John's Hill, facing
the spectacular geology of Salisbury Crags.
Free of the need to scratch for a living, Hutton took up the
enviable life of an Enlightenment polymath. He was forty-one
years old.

It had taken a generation, but the Union had at last

transformed Scotland. Though nationalist dreams would
linger, and for all the cross-border friction that lingers to this
day, the Scots found themselves living under a strong, competent
and stable government, and one that kept itself sufficiently
remote, so long as there were no such unpleasantnesses as
Jacobite risings, to allow the Scots to run their affairs largely
as they liked.
As a result the economy was expanding fast. Scottish
merchants had entered the Atlantic trade with the English
colonies in America, a lucrative opportunity which had
always been closed to them before the Union. A new range
of goods, including tobacco, molasses, sugar and cotton,
flowed into the country, and new exports, including finished
goods like linen and cotton products, began to flood out.
The 'Tobacco Lords' of Glasgow would dominate the market
in their commodity, and become hugely wealthy in the
process.
Now the city of Edinburgh was expanding too. By the time
of Hutton's return, the population of the city had^doubled
since the Union with England, but they were all jammed
into the same old medieval space. It was both 'the most
picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all
capital cities,' said Thomas Gray. The Royal Mile, the spine of
86 AGES IN CHAOS

Castle Hill, was perpetually, thronged .by people, animals,

vehicles and garbage. Away from the Mile you entered a
labyrinth of shadowy, twisting streets of blackened houses
and tenements, with the lower classes and servants jammed
into the upper and lower storeys, and the middle- and
upper-class folk, including nobles, in the middle levels.
You were liable to trip over pigs and sheep in the street, and
if you heard the cry of 'Gardy loo!' from an upper window you
ducked or ran, for a chamber pot was about to be emptied into
the road.
Things were changing, however. In these peaceful times
there was no longer a need for the city to be restricted to its old
defensive position around the ridge of Castle Hill. So in 1766
the planning of a new development, on the hundred acres of
land above the North Loch, had begun.
Unlike the chaotic and disorderly old city, the New Town
would be rigidly organised in the modern style, on a
rectangular grid based on three long and wide avenues. The
political agenda was clear from the naming of the streets: the
three great avenues were to be George Street, Queen Street and
Princes Street (the latter named after the Prince of Wales and
his brother). Nevertheless the new development was uniquely
Scottish. Unlike similar developments in England or France,
the planning of the New Town left no room for huge
aristocratic estates. Only one prominent noble moved in,- the
rest of the development was occupied by Edinburgh's middle
and commercial classes.
The final phase of new Edinburgh's development was the
beautiful Charlotte Square in the westernmost sector, an
inspiration of Robert Adam. The young man who had once
helped Colin Maclaurin plan the defence of the city against
the Bonnie Prince was now a leading architect. Adam's clean
and civilising designs, inspired by the ruins of antiquity,
would make him the most famous and important architect in
Britain.
It was against the background of the elegant new city,
and in the heads of a literate, independent-minded and newly
prosperous populace, that the Scottish Enlightenment would
bloom, causing Voltaire to say, 'It is to Scotland that we
must look for our idea of civilisation.' And it was in this
 CONSOLIDATION 87
sparkling Enlightenment Edinburgh that Hutton now immersed
himself.

Even before his arrival, Hutton was well known in Edinburgh

circles. His old friend John Clerk of Eldin was there, along
with his brother George Clerk-Maxwell, with whom Hutton
had been working on the project to drive a canal between
the Firths of Forth and Clyde. There had been something of
a 'canal mania' in Britain in recent years, as the use of a
canal could cut the costs of transporting coal by half. Later
Hutton and Clerk-Maxwell became shareholders in the Forth
and Clyde Navigation Company. The canal's construction was
begun in 1768, and Hutton would continue on the project until
1777. This overlapped with his other interests, for instance in
seeking raw materials for underwater-setting cement.
Another of Hutton's circle in Edinburgh was James Lind, the
doctor who had discovered the treatment for scurvy. Lind had
planned to sail on Captain Cook's second voyage, but with­
drew and went to Iceland instead. Later he became physician
to the royal household at Windsor. James Russel, Hutton's old
friend from his farming days, was here too. Russel, a
surgeon-apothecary, became a professor of natural philosophy.
Hutton also became friendly with Russel's son. The younger
Russel became a surgeon, eventually rising to the position of
President of the College of Surgeons in 1796, but he always
remained Hutton's family doctor.
Hutton was quick to join the Philosophical Society, which
had been established in 1737 by Colin Maclaurin, Hutton's
Newtonian mentor. Maclaurin had proposed that the Society
for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge, set up in 1731 by
the anatomist Alexander Monro, should be reformulated to
become The Edinburgh Society for Improving Arts and
Sciences and Particularly Natural Knowledge - or, as it became
more popularly known, the Philosophical Society. The
untimely death of Maclaurin cost the Society some of its
momentum. Nonetheless its papers included one lead by
Boswell for Dr George Young, once Hutton's medical tutor, on
'bones found in the ovarium of a woman', and a letter from Dr
B. Franklin to D. Hume, Esq., on 'the Method of Securing
Houses from the Effects of Lightning'.
88 AGES IN CHAOS

Hutton read many papers to-the Society, of which only two

became more widely known, on botany and artillery. But it
seems likely that he speculated widely on philosophy,
epistemology, language, agriculture, geology, chemistry qjid
other subjects which would show up in his later writings. In
1769 Hutton was involved in the Society's attempt to organise
an expedition to observe the transit of Venus across the sun,
but the project turned into something of a fiasco (the transit
was observed successfully by Captain Cook).
For Hutton, the most significant paper of all concerned
'Experiments upon Magnesia Alba, Quicklime, and Some
Other Alkaline Substances', submitted in 1755 by one Joseph
Black MD.
Black, whom Hutton may first have met as a cousin of
Russel's, was born in Bordeaux, two years after Hutton. His
father, native of Belfast but of Scottish descent, was a wine
merchant. Black trained in medicine and science at Belfast and
Glasgow; by 1756, he had taken posts in chemistry and
medicine at the University of Glasgow.
Unlike Hutton, Black also practised his medicine. In 1771
Black would attend Walter Scott's birth: the nurse had
concealed the fact that she had consumption, but she
confided in Black, and the doctor's expertise saved both nurse
and child. Black's kinsman Adam Ferguson would write,
'Without flattery, or uncommon pretension to skill, [Black]
won the confidence of his patients, and, with unaffected
concern for their benefit, was often successful in mitigating
their sufferings, if not in removing their complaints.' You
probably couldn't ask more of a doctor in the late eighteenth
century.
Black's achievements as a chemist, though, are his most
notable. His careful and precise quantitative work anticipated
the methods of modern chemistry. Through experiments on
heating magnesium carbonate, quicklime and other substances,
he proved the existence of carbon dioxide.
What would prove still more significant were Black's
notions on latent heat. While still a student, Black had noticed
that if you warm up a block of ice it melts without changing
temperature. This meant, Black argued, that heat must have
flowed into the ice and combined with its particles, becoming
 CONSOLIDATION 89
'latent' - hidden. Black's work on this hidden heat would be
one of the foundation stones of the modern science of thermo­
dynamics, which has led to a proper understanding of the
working of heat engines of all kinds.
For his part, Hutton was electrified by Black's quicklime
experiments. Hutton's theory needed a way for rocks to be
transformed from one form to another, and - though this
hadn't been their intention - Black's experiments had shown
that this could very well happen under the influence of heat,
opening up a new avenue of thinking for Hutton.
Mutual interests in chemistry and geology drew Hutton and
Black together: Black's chemistry lectures referred to plenty of
geological concepts, including the formation of strata and
mountains, and experiments on quartz, flint and basalt. Black's
ideas prove profoundly significant in shaping Hutton's own
thinking - the pair discussed Hutton's theories of the Earth
over many years - and eventually Black 'subscribed entirely to
the system of his friend.'
Black became perhaps Hutton's closest friend. Like Hutton,
he was a bachelor, but their personalities contrasted strongly.
Playfair noted that 'Black was serious, but not morose,- Hutton
playful but not petulant.' Black, the systematic and quantita­
tive chemist, was careful and cautious in his speculations,
while Hutton 'could be in the air [and] speculate beyond the
laws of nature'. A caricature by John Kay, made when they
were both in their sixties, shows a periwigged Black listening
to Hutton - arms folded, without a formal wig, his bald head
fringed by unruly hair. They are both smiling, and their relaxed
friendship is evident.

While the physical scientists like Hutton would extend Newton's

legacy in their thinking about the natural world, much of the
moral flavour of the Enlightenment was provided by thinkers
like Adam Smith and David Hume, who laid the foundations
of what today are known as the social sciences: sociology,
history, psychology, economics. *
Hutton soon became a close friend of Adam Smith. They
may have met as early as 1751, when Smith was giving
public lectures in Edinburgh. Smith had been born on
Kirkcaldy in 1723. His father had been one of that very
90 AGES IN CHAOS

unpopular breed, the new post-Union customs inspectors.

Smith's Wealth of Nations established him as the first great
modern economist. He endeavoured to apply a Newtonian
analysis to people; starting from basic principles of humanjty
and human nature, he sought to derive principles of law,
economy and international relations. Young Smith's
observations of how smugglers found ever more ingenious
ways to evade the government's strictures were no doubt
an early lesson for him in the power of self-interest in
motivating human beings.
The philosopher David Hume, some fifteen years older than
Hutton and twelve years older than Smith, was the son of a
modestly propertied laird. His mother encouraged him to go to
university to study law, but his omnivorous curiosity soon
drove him to give this up, and he turned to 'books of reasoning
and philosophy, and to poetry and the polite authors'.
In 1734 Hume began a three-year stay in France, mostly at
La Fleche where Descartes had studied a century earlier.
There, by the age of twenty-seven, Hume completed his first
major work - a three-volume Treatise on Human Nature -
which set out the philosophical themes that would dominate
his life's work. But the treatise, he said, 'fell dead-born from
the press'. Over the next decade he expanded and rewrote his
ideas, but without the sustenance of an academic position
Hume had to find other work for a living. He served as private
secretary to a French general who was planning an invasion of
Canada, as emissary to the courts of Vienna and Turin, and
as a librarian. His writing on various subjects gradually won
him a following, most notably for his six-volume History of
England, published by 1762.
It is not clear whether Hutton ever met Hume. There were
certainly links between them: John Clerk of Eldin was the
brother-in-law of Robert Adam, who in turn was a close
friend of Hume. Hutton and Hume could have met in 1766
during Hutton's farming years, when Hume made a short visit
to the family farm at Ninewells, only a few kilometres from
Slighhouses.
Whether they met in person or not, Hume - and particularly
his thinking about the nature of knowledge - had a profound
influence on Hutton.
 CONSOLIDATION 91
Hume saw philosophy as being an experimental science of
human nature, and in progressing that science he drew
inspiration from Newton as well as from such predecessors as
Locke and Berkeley. We can only know anything, after all,
through the operations of the mind, and so to understand the
limits of our knowledge we have to begin with an awareness of
ourselves as observers: 'As the science of man is the only solid
foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation
we can give to this science itself must be based on experience
and observation.'
Hume separated the contents of the mind into 'impressions'
and 'ideas'. Impressions can rise from external sensations or
from internal cognition - an unbidden memory, say. They
include 'all pure sensations, passions and emotions, as they
make their first appearance in the soul'. Ideas, on the other hand,
are the products of analysis and classification. If impressions
are the input to thought, ideas are the output. We need to aid
perception and action: being able to formulate the idea of a
lion from a jumble of impressions is obviously an aid to
avoiding becoming its lunch. To some extent, though, ideas
are disconnected from impressions, and therefore from reality.
This has implications for causality. When we say 'A causes
B' we are really talking about a linking of ideas, not of
impressions, still less of objects out there in the real world.
Hume firmly believed that events themselves are causally
related, and that they will be related in the same way in the
future as the past - so if a falling glass broke yesterday, an
identical glass will break today. These 'natural beliefs', he said,
are shared by everybody, and are in fact necessary to survive.
But he pointed out that we actually have no evidence for such
beliefs, and that there can never be such evidence. He wasn't
denying belief, but questioning unjustified certainty, and he
was trying to make philosophers and scientists think hard
about what they regarded as truth.
Hume's work was very important for Hutton - who was
dealing, in his geology, with remote realms like the depths of
the Earth, or distant ages past, of which we can have no direct
knowledge. How, then, is it possible to know anything about
them at all? He would find tentative answers in Hume's
thinking.
92 AGES IN CHAOS

More controversially, Hume-also asked’very hard questions

about God. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he
asked why we should look for 'mind' as the organising
principle of the universe. Maybe the order we perceive just
emerged. 'For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the
source, or spring, of order originating within itself, as well as
the mind does.' This sentence was written a full century
before Darwin came up with a way to show how the organised
complexity of life could indeed emerge from 'matter itself',
without the need for any guiding mind.
Hume could at times be very harsh about institutional
religion: 'Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the
religious principles which have in fact prevailed in the world.
You will scarcely be persuaded they are anything but sick
men's dreams.' No wonder the popular take on Hume's work
was that he was denying God. This led to him being refused
university posts. Hume and Hutton, in fact, were the most
significant figures of the Scottish Enlightenment not to hold
formal academic positions.
Once Hume took a short cut home to the New Town across
the sticky bog left by the draining of the North Loch. He fell
into the mud and was unable to extricate himself. He asked
a passing fishwife for help, but she recognised 'David Hume
the atheist', and wouldn't help him out until he had repeated
the Lord's Prayer and the Creed of the Apostles. Hume later
took great pleasure in telling the story against himself. He
refrained from publishing the Dialogues, however, until after
his death.

There was, of course, more to the Scottish Enlightenment than

high thinking and public good deeds.
Edinburgh, like other urban centres, was dominated by the
gentlemen's club: an institution Samuel Johnson defined as 'an
assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions'.
Some clubs had dedicated premises, but mostly their meetings
were held in coffee bars and hotels - or, more typically, taverns.
Many of the clubs were dominated by men like Hutton, of the
new middle classes, but some focused membership on the
aristocracy, landed gentry or military officers. Clubs evolved
their own rules and rituals, acted out with solemnity, mock or
 CONSOLIDATION 93
otherwise. New recruits were often subject to initiation rites.
Many of the clubs invented cod histories, and hid their
activities from the general gaze, thus generating an aura of
exclusivity and mystery.
The members of a club might have some shared purpose.
Hutton would no doubt have been aware of the Circulation
Club, whose members commemorated William Harvey's
discovery at annual dinners on his birthday with a circulation
of glasses containing other vital fluids. In about 1770, Black
formed the Poker Club, containing judges, lawyers and soldiers
as well as scholars. This little group - named after the humble
tool that stirs things up in the fireplace - advocated the notion
of an armed militia, based on 'a conviction that there could be
no lasting security for the freedom and independence of these
islands, but in the valour and patriotism of an armed people'.
Black's generation remembered too well the helplessness of
the Edinburgh volunteers before the uncouth forces of Prince
Charlie's army.
Male conviviality, though, was the clubs' primary raison
d'etre. Almost all excluded women, and certainly children: a
gentlemen's club was a place to escape the responsibilities and
constraints of the household - to talk dirty, act badly and,
especially, to get drunk.
Enlightenment Edinburgh was awash. The drink of
preference was claret, a legacy of Scotland's historical ties to
France. Even after 1707, when the English fashion for port and
sherry began to move into Scotland, sticking to claret came to
seem a patriotic act - whisky was still seen as a crude local
brew.
The quantities consumed could be heroic. A gentleman would
be labelled a 'two- or three-bottle man', depending on his
consumption over dinner. Then after the meal, the protocol
was for the host to toast each guest in turn - and then each
guest toasted his host, and each of the other guests. A little
mathematics shows that even a modest gathering of, say, five
people would require a total of twenty toasts to be raised. But
the booze wasn't restricted to dinner. Drinking, according to
one account, 'engrossed the leisure hours of all professional
men, scarcely excepting even the most stern and dignified'.
People would drink over business deals and legal matters, even
94 AGES IN CHAOS

preparing for a day's work on the bench. ’

Not all the clubs were particularly intellectually minded.
The notorious Beggar's Benison had been founded out in the
sticks in Fife, where bored local merchants and landowners
toyed with bawdiness, irreverence, and a little playful
Jacobitism. Its title celebrated the exploits of the Stuart King
James V. Once, the legend went, James came to a burn he
was reluctant to cross, and paid a beggar woman to carry him
over. She thanked him with her benison, or blessing: 'May
prick nor purse never fail you.' The club would become
infamous for the obscenity of some of its activities, not least
the hiring of 'posture girls' for the edification of its
gentlemen. By 1752, the club had a branch in Edinburgh.
One historian would claim that 'it is difficult to say who, of
any prominence in literature or society, at that time, was not
a member of the Beggar's Benison.' The Benison even granted
an honorary membership to the Prince of Wales - later
George IV - a notorious socialite who gorged, drank and
flaunted his mistresses in public.
It is not known whether Hutton was a member of the
Benison, but as far back as 1741 his good friend Sir John Clerk
had been a correspondent of the Benison's 'sovereign' over a
Roman phallus that had turned up in Scotland (Clerk was a
noted antiquarian). Hutton might have enjoyed the Benison's
cheerful adoption of Ussher's timescale for the invented
origins of their society; as sex was created with Adam and Eve,
so was the Benison's 'most ancient and puissant order'.
Of course, there was a downside to all this. In the 1780s
William Creech, eventually Hutton's publisher, would
satirically portray a dark mirror of the gentlemen's clubs - the
'Jezebel Club', a society for the prostitutes whose numbers
had multiplied during the years of the Enlightenment. The
Jezebel Club had ongoing vacancies, Creech said harshly, for
many of its members were dying, 'decayed', before they were
twenty.

In this milieu Hutton lived his life to the full.

Freed of the strictures of husbandry, with no pressure to earn
money, and with a bachelor's lack of domestic constraints,
Hutton evolved a comfortable lifestyle. He would rise late. He
 CONSOLIDATION 95
was endlessly busy with his intellectual, public and business
projects. He wrote continually - he 'was in the habit of using
his pen continually as an instrument of thought' - and he left
behind an 'incredible quantity' of manuscript, much of it never
intended for publication.
In these progressive times there was a good deal of public
spirit about. Hutton showed no signs of ardent nationalism, but
he was clearly proud of the rebirth of Scotland, and he advocated
projects like the canal scheme which he believed would benefit
his country. In 1777, he published a short work called
Considerations on the Nature, Quality, and Distinctions of
Coal and Culm, his first publication since his medical thesis.
Parliament had laid down different rates of sea-transport tax for
coal-dust, depending on whether it was good enough for 'coal',
used for domestic hearths, or only good enough for 'culm', fit
for kilns. Since there was no test to distinguish these abstruse
qualities, Scotland found itself penalised. In his pamphlet
Hutton described a simple test based on nothing more than
throwing a handful of dust onto a red-hot shovel and seeing
what happened. This quickly resolved the situation and brought
financial relief to the industry.
Meanwhile, Hutton kept up his interests from his farming
days. He became interested in the political aspects of agri­
culture. Despite his friendship with Adam Smith, he believed
in government intervention in agriculture, as it was too
important to be left to market forces and chance: 'The
husbandman maintains the nation in all its ease, its affluence
and its splendour,' he wrote. But farmers too had a
responsibility for the public good. Rotation of crops, ensuring
equal acreages of different crops at any given time, would help
keep prices stable.
The urge to experiment did not leave him. Visitors to his
Edinburgh garden would see patches of cauliflower, half of
which had been grown in unfertilised soil and half in soil
fertilised with nitre. He was often consulted on agricultural
issues, and he helped his friend Joseph Black with experiments
on unusual types of soils, and on dyes made from vegetable
products.
He kept up his climate studies too. His new house was only
a few hundred metres from Arthur's Seat, and he took to walk­
96 AGES IN CHAOS

ing up the great volcanic plug in all seasons and all weathers,
to study the relationship'between altitude and temperature.
These studies, involving tediously obtained records compiled
over long periods, offer another glimpse of Hutton the working
scientist: his geological theories may have been bold and his
manner impulsive and speculative, but he was capable of
persistent, careful and thoroughly practical experimental and
observational work.
The evenings were the focus of Hutton's life. He was
evidently popular in the Edinburgh clubs: he lacked self­
consciousness, which would 'sometimes lead him into little
eccentricities, that formed an amusing contrast with the
graver habits of a philosophic life'. He took great pleasure in
'domestic society'. Hutton's circles of friends included
'accomplished individuals of both sexes' - in fact, in his moral
thinking, he had come to believe in 'the importance of the
female character to society, in a state of high civilisation'. He
had evidently got over the unhappy misogyny that had
afflicted him after his disastrous love affair, and the loneliness
of his farming days was a memory.
Playfair records that his conversation was always lively,
forceful and informed, and full of wit and speculation. Judging
from his few surviving letters (he was not a great correspon­
dent) his speech would have been rambling, entertaining, and
taken at a rush. For example, in a letter of 1774 to George
Clerk-Maxwell he described a visit to Bath in a mixture of
jokes, bawdiness, mild blasphemy, with a little geology
thrown in: 'To be sure Bath is the most curious 81 valuable
spot in Britain without exception - for a place to have had the
chaude pisse [the hot springs] for many thousand years and be
as embonpoint as those that have shitten snowballs ever since
the immaculate conception of the blessed virgin tho a little
paradoxical is notwithstanding very true - Some places have
lime to a vice like the chalk downs, but here tho you see
nothing but lime there is an abundance of fine strong soil ...'
Despite such evidence Playfair paints a portrait of a
restrained, almost ascetic character. Hutton dined early and
usually at home, Playfair would have us believe, and 'he ate
sparingly, and drank no wine'. Robert Louis Stevenson, born
1850, would look on Raeburn's portrait and remark on 'Hutton
 CONSOLIDATION 97
the geologist, in quakerish raiment, looking altogether trim
and narrow, as if he cared more about fossils than young
ladies'.
However, Playfair knew Hutton only in the geologist's
middle and old age, and, writing after Hutton's death and in
a moral and political climate transformed by the horrors of
the French Revolution, he was trying to present a sanitised
Hutton to the world, a model Enlightenment gentleman whose
scientific theories thereby carried a little more authority.
Hutton's letters show us that behind Playfair's frozen image
there was a human being - warm, impulsive, crude, funny,
lustful, and frequently drunk. James Hutton was surely no
libertine, but there is no reason to suppose he lived monkishly.
I find it pleasing to believe that Hutton, who was working out
his own essentially optimistic and uplifting vision of the Earth
as a work of God's bounty, would have accepted the gift of his
carnality in the same sense.
And above all, there was the geology.
Hutton continued to amass geological samples. The rocks
were his 'treasures' and his 'ewe lambs'. As always, friends and
acquaintances sent him material from Britain and abroad:
he had rocks from Labrador, Sweden, Spain, Africa, the Urals,
Gibraltar. Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist who had travelled
around the world with Cook, sent him material from Iceland.
It was a relief for Hutton to move into his new house on St
John's Hill; his collection was taking up too much space.
Before that he had been 'obliged to make one chamber serve
me for laboratory, library and repository for self and minerals,
of which I am grown so avaricious, my friends allege I shall
soon gather as many stones as will build me a house'. Hutton
would examine his specimens chemically and under the micro­
scope, and then varnish them to keep them looking bright. He
would prune his hoard to focus on the most intellectually
valuable samples. He would say, 'My ambition is to make a
spacious library, where the books shall consist, in the ancient
manner, of tablets of stone, and (without any mystical sense)
wrote by the finger of God alone.'
His great theory of the Earth seems never to have been far
from his mind. He had found no reason to question his basic
conclusion, that Earth is a self-renewing machine whose
98 AGES IN CHAOS

purpose is to sustain life. But he still needed a way to bake

rubble into rock, and an eiigine to drive his mighty continental
uplift.
He found the answers, at last, in the machinery of Jthe
Industrial Revolution.
 II
'The power of heat is unlimited’

James Watt's first large-scale steam engine was erected in the

Burn Pitt colliery at Kinneil in 1765. Hutton visited Kinneil,
and as noted would later comment on marine fossils he
observed there.
Hutton had become a close friend of Watt. They probably
met through their mutual friend Joseph Black, or possibly
through the canal scheme; Watt spent eight years working as a
land surveyor on the project, marking out routes across
Scotland. Playfair tells us that Hutton 'had an uncommon
facility in comprehending mechanical contrivances ... He would
rejoice over Watt's improvements to the steam engine ... with
all the warmth of a man who was to share in the honour and
profit about to accrue to them.'
Watching the pumping pistons of Watt's prototype, Hutton
was mightily impressed with what he saw.

Hutton had come back to Edinburgh with two key questions.

He had in his head his vision of the Earth's dynamic cycles,
serving the divine purpose of making the surface habitable.
Very well. But if rocks were consolidated from the debris
produced by erosion - well, how? What agency could possibly
transform sand into sandstone, sea creatures into chalk, rubble
into conglomerate rock? And if the new rocks were uplifted to
make new lands - again, how? What could provide the tremen­
dous energies necessary to erect mountains and lift continents?
There was no answer to be had in the conventional wisdom
that prevailed in Britain and across the Continent.
The still unnamed science of geology was slowly maturing.
As Hutton seems to have realised for himself, it had come to
be understood that the theories of cosmogonists like Burnet
would remain just imaginative fancies unless more informa­
tion was gathered; and that could only come from a
painstaking examination of rocks in the field. Here geologists
100 AGES IN CHAOS

in Europe took the lead, with careful studies of layers of rocks

in Sweden and Germany; while Nicolas Desmarest explored
the extinct volcanoes of central France.
Meanwhile, new theories of the Earth were devised, more
soundly based on the new types of data and classifications of
the rocks. Some of these derived strictly from scripture, others
less so. But they all generally clung to the notion that Earth's
rocks had all been deposited from some primeval fluid: even
now, they were essentially descendants of the story of Noah's
Flood.
Some of these theories, influenced by Hutton's old contact
Rouelle in France, purported to explain the order in which
rocks were found in the ground. Most of them held that the
rocks had been laid down in a once-and-for-all fashion - and
granite, the bedrock of the continents and mountains, was
usually taken as the most 'primitive', the oldest rock of all.
This, of course, ran counter to Hutton's own thinking; accord­
ing to his slowly coalescing model, every rock type could be
renewed, and nothing was truly 'primitive', unchanged since
the formation of Earth.
There were many other problems with these soggy theories.
What could the primordial fluid, in which all the rocks were
supposed to have been dissolved, possibly have been made of?
Certainly not water: 'If it is by means of water that those
interstices have been filled with those materials,' Hutton
would write, 'water must be ... an universal solvent, or cause
of fluidity, and we must change entirely our opinion of water
in relation to its chemical character.' In fact, Hutton knew
there was no one solvent which was capable of dissolving all
the minerals he saw in the rocks - nor even of dissolving all the
different varieties you could find within one specimen, if you
looked hard enough.
The compactness of the rocks presented a further difficulty.
In conglomerate rocks - rocks composed of fragments of other
rocks - there was no space between the component parts. So
what had happened to the solvent fluid? Surely some of it
should have been trapped inside the solidifying rocks. And
why should the fragments of rock fit together so well? It
looked more as if the rocks had melted, and then flowed, to fill
up the spaces like toffee in a mould.
 CONSOLIDATION 101
Black's 1755 experiment seems to have been the trigger that
turned Hutton's attention to heat as the solution to these
conundrums. Heat was certainly another way to turn rocks
into liquid. When they had melted, the rocks would flow to fill
all available spaces. Suppose, then, that the rubble of eroded
rock and fossils was baked in some great subterranean oven to
form limestone, chalk and the other rocks?
There were obvious objections to any heat theory. Consider
coal, for instance. Here was a substance formed within the
Earth, but which when brought to the surface is flammable. So
how could it have been created by the action of heat? Wouldn't
it simply have burned up under the ground?
Another problem was posed by limestone. In his 1755
experiment, Black, on heating a magnesium carbonate lime­
stone, had succeeded in driving carbon dioxide out of the rock.
Black was interested in the carbon dioxide he had thereby
discovered, but what intrigued Hutton was the limestone
itself. If limestone was formed by heat - and its crystalline
structure certainly suggested that it had been - shouldn't its
carbon dioxide have been driven off in the process? So how
could it have still been there for Black to find?
An answer suggested itself in the work of Denis Papin, a
French physicist and pioneer of steam-engine principles. While
experimenting with pressure vessels - 'digesters' - Papin
showed that water required more heat to boil when under
pressure. So pressure affects the action of heat.
Perhaps limestone, then, was formed under great pressure -
pressure that had trapped the carbon dioxide in its substance,
even when great heat was applied to it. And perhaps, likewise,
there was a way to bake dead wood into coal without burning
it, if you again applied enough pressure - and surely Earth's
interior must be subject to extremely high pressure?
To back up these tentative ideas, Hutton became interested
in laboratory experiments on the effect of heat on rocks.
Following his experiments on limestone, Black had already
tried melting basalt. By 1772 Hutton was performing
experiments of his own on zeolites, minerals in which water
was trapped in cavities. Presumably in the kitchen of his
Edinburgh home, he ground up the rocks, combined the dust
with acid into a paste and boiled it to study its decomposition.
102 AGES IN CHAOS

Hutton also asked Watt to use his steam-engine furnaces to

heat a piece of iron to red heat and report whether it became
brittle. Similar trials were proceeding elsewhere. Other
experimenters melted lavas to form a variety of glasses, apd
the Frenchman Desmarest tried to melt specimens of granite.
As ever with these Enlightenment polymaths, some of the
experimentation was motivated by profit. Watt, for example,
had a share in the Delftfield Pottery Company in Glasgow.
Porcelain is basically fine-grained earth mixed with glass.
Many experimenters, inspired by research into Chinese manu­
facturing methods, had studied feldspar, a mineral common in
granite, and kaolin - china clay - ingredients used by the
Chinese. By 1768 Black and Watt were experimenting with
these and similar substances, melting them in crucibles to see
what resulted.
Meanwhile, it seems to have occurred to Hutton that sub­
terranean heat might also be the solution to his other key
problem: the source of the energy he needed if he was to raise
continents. After all, he was a friend of James Watt himself: to
see the potential of heat to do mechanical work, he only had
to look around Watt's workshops.

The world's first steam engine was probably the aeolipile,

invented in the first century by Hero of Alexandria, a Greek
geometer and inventor. Hero set a metal sphere with two
canted nozzles on an axis over a boiler. When steam spurted
from the nozzles, the sphere spun around. It was a startling,
anachronistic invention. But in the context of the times, the
aeolipile remained no more than a toy, a potentially world­
transforming idea soon to be lost in the Dark Ages.
The growth of industry in Britain in the seventeenth century
created a strong motivation to find a new power source to
replace water, wind and the work of human and animal
muscles - a source preferably unaffected by geographical
location and the weather. Without such a source, most
factories were still limited to the rare locations suitable for
running waterwheels.
The steam-engine principle seems to have been rediscovered
by Papin (whose observations on the effects of pressure on boil­
ing water had helped inspire Hutton's ideas on subterranean
 CONSOLIDATION 103
compression). Papin's experimental pressure cooker, his
'digester', was capable of creating a pressure difference which
drew water up through a certain height: that is, the steam
could be made to do work.
Thomas Newcomen's 1712 design was the first commer­
cially successful steam engine. His steam pump was basically
an upright cylinder fitted with a piston. When steam was
allowed to expand into the cylinder it pushed the piston to the
top of its stroke. Water was then squirted into the cylinder,
cooling the whole apparatus down. The steam condensed and
contracted, creating a partial vacuum inside the cylinder,
which pulled the piston back down, ready for the next stroke.
Newcomen's engine was crude - it converted only one per
cent of the steam's heat energy into mechanical energy - but it
was a practical way of putting heat to work. Its basic design
was unrivalled for fifty years. Even before James Watt was
born, Newcomen's 'fire-engine' had become a workhorse in
draining Welsh mines.
But it was Watt who would figure out how steam could be
harnessed most effectively, thus changing the world.
Ten years younger than Hutton, Watt was born in Greenock.
As a boy he had spent much time in his father's workshops,
where he had his own tools, bench and forge, and made models
of cranes and barrel organs - practical engineers always tell
you that there is no substitute for the experience of cutting tin.
At the age of seventeen, Watt aimed to become a maker of
mathematical instruments. By 1757, he had opened a shop in
Glasgow and was making compasses, scales and quadrants. He
met Joseph Black, and began learning chemistry; he and Black
would argue over the nature and applications of heat.
Before long, though, Watt branched out into making musical
instruments. Perhaps the mathematical-instrument business
didn't pay well enough. Soon he was making and selling flutes,
violins, guitars, even a barrel organ, which still survives - and
naturally, being a Scot, bagpipes. (It may be that Watt's morals
were a little lax at this time. Among the bits and pieces in his
workshop has been found a steel stamp for marking wooden
goods with the maker's name - but the stamp bears not his
name, but that of Thomas Lot, the Parisian doyen of flute­
makers. A Lot flute would bring in a great deal more than a
104 AGES IN CHAOS

Watt one. Was Watt passing off cheap imitations?

Watt's attention was drawn to steam engines by his friend
John Robison. Robison, who studied under Black, was involved
in another of the age's great enterprises; in 1762 he represented
the Board of Longitude on the voyage to Jamaica which tested
John Harrison's latest chronometer. Robison had wondered if
steam engines could be applied 'to the moving of wheel­
carriages, and other purposes'.
Intrigued, Watt took apart a model of a Newcomen steam
engine, owned by the University of Glasgow. He laboured over
the model for a year, trying to improve its performance. Black's
notions of latent heat helped him understand the engine's
operation. Watt eventually saw that the engine's inherent
inefficiency came from raising and lowering the temperature
of the whole working cylinder during the operating cycle from
steam inlet to condensation. Watt took the steam out to a
separate condenser and allowed it to cool and contract away
from the main cylinder, making it unnecessary to heat up and
cool the whole cylinder with each piston stroke - you only had
to heat up the steam itself, while the bulk of the apparatus
could be kept at steam temperature. The idea of the separate
condenser was Watt's most fundamental contribution to steam
technology. Even his first experimental engines, operating by
1765, cut fuel costs by three quarters.
Loans from Joseph Black had helped Watt build these first
small-scale test engines. Now, through an introduction by
Black, he entered a partnership with John Roebuck - the
glassmaker who had provided Hutton and Davie with glass
spheres for their factory - who offered to pay for development
of the new engine if Watt could build a prototype for the
foundry at Kinneil. Watt took out his first patent, on 'A New
Invented Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and
Fuel in Fire Engines', in 1769.
Watt's early years were blighted by a slow struggle for com­
mercial success. Hutton was always kindly and concerned,
advising Watt over such issues as how to approach Parliament
to cover his work with patents: he wrote to Watt in 1774, 'I am
sincerely of the opinion that a short account of the machine
should be made out with the distinct estimate of its value
compared with the common one and then represent that
 CONSOLIDATION 105
besides the invention of this uncommon advantage it has cost
many years labour 81 expense to bring it to the perfection of
utility.' And in 1788 Hutton monitored a steam engine designed
by one William Symington which he believed breached Watt's
patents.
Hutton also tried to find Watt lucrative positions in Scotland
working for city councils, or even the police, and he advanced
Watt's case with influential friends. Hutton became very critical
of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on
the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt
he wrote, 'I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir
himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve
themselves.'
Hutton was not above teasing Watt, though. In a note in
1774 he wrote, 'I write this to desire something to fill my
vacuum which you know nature abhors - this is the reason
that philosophers whose business it is to turn nature upside
down have invented cylinders full of steam with condensers at
their arse which is vexing whipping and spurring nature to
work out of her ordinary course that these bougres [buggers]
may sit idle on their arse ... Not so St Samson who was a holy
man tho neither a philosopher nor a Bachelor god knows, he
turned the mill himself and after lying all night with a whore
at Garza he carried away the gates of the toon next morning on
his back and all this without any subterfuge or second hand
work.'
It was surely at Kinneil, if not earlier, that Hutton's lively
mind, while pondering on the potential of Watt's crude but
already powerful prototype, speculated that machines driven
by heat could be mighty indeed.

The energies Hutton saw working in Watt's first machines

clearly inspired him to think of the Earth as containing a
tremendous heat engine. It was certainly an elegant solution to
his dual problem, that the subterranean heat that created the
new rocks in the first place should also be the agent that
uplifted them: 'We may, perhaps, account for the elevation of
land, by the same cause with that of the consolidation of
strata.' And just as Watt's steam engines would soon empower
the Industrial Revolution, so Hutton saw no end to the
io6 AGES IN CHAOS

capacities of such immense energies. As he would say in 1785,

'The power of heat for the expansion of bodies, is, so far as we
know, unlimited.'
But what was heat? Today we know that it is a phenomenon
of the random motion of atoms and molecules. In a hot gas,
molecules fly more rapidly; in a hot solid the molecules
vibrate more enthusiastically about their average positions.
But in Hutton's time, despite the pioneering work of Black and
others, theorists struggled to explain the nature of heat.
After all, even the nature of matter wasn't understood. Some
of Newton's contemporaries, particular Robert Hooke and
Robert Boyle, were already 'atomists'. But others of Newton's
followers had tried to devise systems of nature dominated by
the motion of 'subtle fluids' or 'ethers'. These strange sub­
stances were supposed to permeate everything, and to underlie
phenomena from gravity to electromagnetism and light. The
interpretation of heat as a random motion of molecules (the
modern view) became overshadowed by the notion of heat as a
subtle fluid called caloric. This fluid would flow from cold
places to hot: so when the sun warms your face, a gentle rain
of solar caloric is actually falling on your skin. This wasn't a
bad theory in its own right; the French scientist Sadi Carnot
used it to derive his great theories in thermodynamics, includ­
ing the 'Carnot cycle' description of the working of heat
engines which is still used today. (In the end the caloric theory
was beaten by careful and quantitative experiments on
chemical combinations and heat engines by Thomson, Joule
and others.)
Hutton absorbed all these ideas, and, following the
pioneering work of Black, began to develop his own theoretical
model of the nature and behaviour of heat.
Of course theorising, standing around admiring steam engines,
and melting a few bits of rock in the lab, was all very well. But
if rocks really were shaped by some subterranean source of
heat, there ought to be more evidence out in the field.
Thinking about this, Hutton's attention was drawn to basalt.
We know now that basalt is actually a common form of lava
- that is, solidified magma, once-liquid rock. But in the
standard diluvian theories it was held to have been laid down
out of the primordial ocean, along with everything else. As
 CONSOLIDATION 107
many observers before Hutton had noted, basalt was usually
found in veins that passed through layers of rock of other
kinds. It often looked as if the basalt had been injected there in
a liquid form, and then solidified in place. In 1764 Hutton had
observed an example of this at Crieff, and in Edinburgh he
found an example closer to home: in Salisbury Crags, in fact,
just a few hundred metres from his front door. 'On the south
side of Edinburgh I have seen, in little more than the space of
a mile from east to west, nine or ten masses of whinstone
[basalt] interjected among the strata.' Part of the exposure he
found is now called 'Hutton's Section'.
Hutton became convinced that basalt had an igneous origin:
that is, it must have been formed by the action of heat (the
word 'igneous', like 'ignition', derives from the Latin word for
'fire'). If Hutton was to establish his heat argument he had to
find instances of basalt and other rocks which showed
unequivocal signs of the action of heat. And to show that the
renewal of Earth was real he had to prove that 'primitive' rocks
like granite, supposedly laid down before life had formed,
weren't so primitive after all: he needed to find fossils in them.
To do all that, he would have to go out on the road again.
Thus in 1774, at the age of forty-eight, Hutton set off for an
extensive geological tour of England and Wales.
 12
"Lord pity the arse that's clagged *
to a head that will hunt stones'
The first leg of Hutton's summer jaunt was a trip to Birmingham
in the company of James Watt.
The year 1774 was a pivotal time for Watt. Roebuck, his
original financier, had gone bankrupt, but Watt had found a new
partner in Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer from Birmingham
who had in fact been one of his creditors. In September 1773
his wife had died through complications in pregnancy. It was
time for a new start, and in Boulton he found a strong supporter,
'an iron chieftain' as Boswell would call him. Watt agreed to
emigrate to Birmingham, taking his Kinneil prototype engine
with him. He tried to persuade Hutton and Black to travel with
him, but in the event Hutton was the only one of those bachelor
philosophers to make the trip.
On 17 May 1774, then, Hutton and Watt set off south.

Hutton and Watt arrived in Birmingham, after 'a pleasant

journey in which nothing remarkable happened', as Watt
wrote. But on the way they probably visited salt mines in
Cheshire, where Hutton made a startling and satisfying obser­
vation. In one mine, the rock salt was in a layer 'thirty or forty
feet deep' sandwiched in strata of red marl (a limestone clay).
The salt was solid and in places pure and transparent, but a lot
of it was stained with the marl.
If the salt had been laid down from water, then Hutton
would have expected to see strata in it. And when he looked at
the base of the rock, at first that was what he thought he saw.
But further up, as Hutton reported in 1785, 'the most beautiful
and regular figure was to be observed ... It was all composed of
concentric circles; and these appeared to be the section of a
mass, composed altogether of concentric spheres.' The salt
mass was like one gigantic onion - or a pearl, or a gobstopper
- with spherical layers one over the other, clearly marked out
 CONSOLIDATION 109
by the marl. This couldn't be the result of deposition from
water: the only possible conclusion was that the whole salt
mass had once been molten, and had solidified in place. And
the only agent that could do that, of course, was heat. It was a
remarkable, if serendipitous, bit of evidence for the role played
by heat in the formation of rocks.
Hutton stayed in Birmingham for some time. He met
Matthew Boulton and members of the industrialist's circle,
and he used Birmingham as a base for some geological explo­
rations of Derbyshire. Watt, meanwhile, was welcomed into
the group that would become, in 1775, the Lunar Society. This
group of distinguished Birmingham-based scientists and artists
met monthly, on the occasion of the full moon, to advance the
sciences and the arts - not quite an Edinburgh club perhaps,
but congenial company. Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood
were Lunaticks, and on this visit Hutton met Erasmus Darwin,
James Keir, and John Whitehurst, the geologist.
Hutton no doubt argued happily with Whitehurst over his
view that the present disordered state of the Earth must be due
to a catastrophic pulse of heat from the interior, which had
elevated the Alps and the other mountains, and left the strata
in ruins. Hutton would have disagreed with much of this
theory, such as its lack of a system of renewal, but at least
Whitehurst was thinking about inner heat, and he did
speculate on an igneous origin for basalt.
Captain James Keir, meanwhile, had also studied medicine
at Edinburgh. After spending eleven years in the army he
became an industrialist, with shares in glass and chemical
works. Keir also dabbled in experimental geology. In 1776 he
would report on experiments on the crystallisation of glass to
the Royal Society in London, backing up Hutton's notions of
subterranean heat: 'Does not this discovery, of a property in
glass to crystallise, reflect a high degree of probability on the
opinion that the great native crystals of basalts, such as those
which form the Giant's Causeway ... have been produced by
the crystallisation of a vitreous lava ...?' This work would
influence the researches of Hutton's friend Sir James Hall
twenty years later.
Erasmus Darwin, a few years younger than Hutton, would
become grandfather to Charles. He was a very successful
no AGES IN CHAOS

doctor - so much so that George III had offered him a position

as his personal physician in London, a post that Darwin refused,
not wanting to move away from his practice in Lichfield. He
was a polymath like Hutton, with learned opinions on a wide
variety of subjects. Something of a radical, he often wrote up
his scientific opinions in verse. He would develop his own
theory of evolution, though unlike his grandson, Erasmus
believed that species shaped themselves to the world in a
purposeful way, rather than through the random workings of
natural selection.
It may be that Darwin influenced Hutton's thinking about
nature, for in his final publication, Hutton would produce
speculations that look in retrospect very like Charles Darwin's
theories of natural selection: 'In concerning an infinite 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 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.' Unlike Charles Darwin, how­
ever, Hutton did not follow the logic of this tantalising remark
to its conclusion. Conversely, Hutton left Darwin with a taste
for geologising.
On this first visit, Hutton joined with Darwin in a playful
experiment in which an air gun was fired onto the bulb of a
thermometer, to study the cooling effects of expansion.
This congenial stay couldn't last forever, though: in July
Hutton set off for some solo geologising in the wilds of Wales.

It is hard for us now to grasp the hardship that a journey like

this would have meant for the forty-eight-year-old Hutton. It
was a time when long-distance journeys were undertaken on
foot, horseback, or - if you were lucky - stagecoach. In 1750, a
weekly coach service had begun between Edinburgh and London,
taking five days, cut to a mere three by the end of the century.
Benjamin Franklin, during his visits, was surprised how good
the English roads were. He managed to complete one hundred
kilometres even on a 'short winter day', for there were stations
with fresh horses every fifteen or twenty kilometres. The Welsh
 CONSOLIDATION III

roads, on the other hand, were a good deal worse.

Leaving Birmingham, Hutton passed through Dudley and
Stourbridge. On his first night alone he stayed in Bridgnorth,
on the Welsh borders. He wrote to Clerk-Maxwell that he was
looking to Wales 'with the eye of faith', 'with my arse to the
east & face to the Irish channel being willing to see through
Wales or at least to look at it; it will cost me some leather no
doubt.' Hutton's stay with the Lunar Society folk had been
stimulating, but Bridgnorth wasn't so exciting. 'I have eat
green goose, but notwithstanding the weather would seem to
favour spontaneous generation a slice of cucumber is all I have
got in the vocable of C, and that you know is no provocative I
have just muddled with brandy & water & so to bed.'
This bawdy stuff, two centuries out of date, takes a bit of
translating. Hutton is really telling Clerk-Maxwell about his
amatory adventures. The 'C' probably means 'cunt'. 'Green
goose' was slang for a bird of less than four months old,
probably meaning here a young girl. But all that seemed to be
on offer in Bridgnorth was 'a slice of cucumber', meaning a
married woman, which he didn't find quite so stimulating. (So
much for Playfair's portrait of a sober ascetic!)
From Bridgnorth, Hutton set off into central and south
Wales. In Wales he mostly had to ride on horseback, and his
backside took a good deal of punishment: during this forty-day
tour his riding breeches would wear out four times. He felt
very sorry for himself: 'Lord pity the arse that's clagged
[attached] to a head that will hunt stones.' Hutton's letters
make eighteenth-century Wales sound like the Wild West:
'Upon the Holyhead road is nothing to be met with but either
vultures or bad doing ... If you travel in a machine they pick
the inside of your purse if on horseback you peel the outside of
your arse.'
One object of his trip to Wales was to figure out the origin of
a certain hard gravel of granulated quartz, much in evidence
around Birmingham. He had some trouble finding the rock he
wanted. But he was also looking for samples for Watt's-interests
in the Glasgow pottery company, and for Keir's glass works. He
would write to Watt, 'I have found the crystalline, but where I
least expected -1 could not help singing all that day long - what
do you think was the song - "she sought him east, she sought
112 AGES IN CHAOS

him west, she sought him broad and narrow ..."' This was a
verse of an old Scots ballad. Most importantly, in the
'primitive' Welsh mountains he was looking for traces of
fossils, which would be a cornerstone of his hoped-for
debunking of the Flood theorists.
By the end of July, Hutton had left Wales behind, none too
impressed. He travelled through Wiltshire, and eventually
reached Bath. That wasn't much fun either. The houses in the
newly built and very fashionable parts of the town struck him
as lacking in character: Bath was like 'a warehouse where
towns may be furnished with fine places ready made'. Still,
Hutton made the best of it. He stayed at the Pelican Inn in
Walcot Street, just off the London Road. The Pelican was an
inn of quality where Samuel Johnson would stay in 1776, but
Hutton was 'as solitary as if upon the top of Mount Ararat, not
a soul to speak to'.
Everywhere he went, Hutton collected geological samples,
often sending them home to the safe keeping of a cousin of his
partner Davie. 'I have this day packed a hogshead of bibles all
wrote by God's own finger,' he wrote to Clerk-Maxwell from
Bath; 'they are to go by the way of Greenock if they can find
the way.' Sometimes the wait was trying; he wrote to Watt in
1774, 'Set all the Bells and hammers of Birmingham a ringing
for my treasures are arrived in the Firth [of Forth] though as yet
not come to hand.'
Hutton was a gregarious man who missed the companion­
ship of his friends. Perhaps these days of isolation brought
back memories of his lonely years on the farm. He finished one
solitary evening, as he wrote to Clerk-Maxwell, by drinking
the last of his 'sixpenny'th of toddy to omnibus friendibus
concubinibus ubicumque' - his pidgin Latin meaning 'Here's
to all concubines wherever they are.'
For Watt, meanwhile, Boulton's reliable financial input had
suddenly made fast progress possible. Watt was trying to
develop a new rotary steam engine as an alternative to
Newcomen's venerable vertical design: the idea for a 'steam
wheel' had been covered in his 1769 patent, but he hadn't had
the chance to develop the concept until now. It was a key
moment in the history of technology, and Hutton was keenly
aware of what was happening. He wrote to Watt, 'Is your egg
 CONSOLIDATION 113
hatched yet, or are you still sitting brooding like a bubly jock?7
(that is, like a turkey). And he wrote to Clerk-Maxwell of
Watt's successful experiments with his new 'curious wheel':
'This will raise his fame yonder it being so new a thing for that
is what catches the multitude ... Tell Dr Black of Watt's
success.'

Hutton had considered going on from Bath into Cornwall, but

'my money will not hold out'. (He never would explore
Cornwall.) He decided instead to go back to the Midlands: 'I
begin to be tired speaking to nothing but stones and long for a
fresh bit of mortality to make sauce to them.'
Shropshire was already a hub of the Industrial Revolution. In
the year of Hutton's visit the first iron bridge was being cast at
Coalbrookdale, to be erected at Ironbridge in 1779. Here
Hutton climbed the Wrekin, a peak some four hundred metres
high in the Shropshire Hills. The Wrekin is a mass of rhyolites
and quartzites, and its appeal for Hutton was probably related
to his interest in raw materials for porcelain manufacture.
His companion on this climb was Charles Francis Greville,
then aged twenty-five, a keen mineralogist. Greville would go
on to hold many political offices, and would also become the
protector of Emma Hart. Emma would marry Greville's uncle,
Sir William Hamilton, after Greville sent her to Naples in
1786 to be Hamilton's mistress. This was part of a deal made in
return for Hamilton paying off Greville's debts. This wouldn't
do Hamilton much good, however, as Emma became the mistress
of Horatio Nelson. After Nelson's death she squandered her
inheritances from both husband and lover, was imprisoned for
debt, and would die in poverty and exile.
The Wrekin adventure was hazardous, as the two men
climbed the summit by night and 'groped our way home two
or three miles by the light of the stars'.
After Shropshire, Hutton went back to Wales, this time to
Anglesey and the north. Anglesey is an island of low and fertile
plains, contrasting with the mountainous Welsh mainland.
Hutton would compare the straits between Anglesey and
Wales with those between Sicily and Italy as an example of
erosion,- the sea had evidently broken through a neck of land
that had once joined island to mainland. On this visit Hutton
114 AGES IN CHAOS

was disappointed in his quest for an unspecified 'white stuff',

presumably another mineral of interest for an industrial
enterprise concerning himself and Watt.
Whilst in Anglesey, Hutton visited the Parys copper mine,
near Cerrig y Bleiddie in the north-east of the island. He was
impressed with Parys - 'the mine is an immense lump of
pyrites iron mixed with copper' - and with its working. He
compared it to the immense open-cast copper mine at Fahlun
in Sweden, and described the mine's processes in detail to
Watt: 'The poorer ore is kindled in great heaps like lime kilns
and burns of itself with the smell and quality of hell fire for
three months sometimes.' The mining at Parys had begun in
earnest in the 1760s, as the ships of the British navy began to
have the bottoms of their hulls sheathed in copper. Parys
would subsequently outstrip Cornish mining and dominate
the copper trade for twenty years, and the competition it
introduced would open up markers for Watt's engines, but by
the 1790s production was falling, and in 1794 Hutton would be
sad to hear the mine was failing.
Hutton's journey home was erratic. From Anglesey he went
back to Manchester, and detoured south to see Watt. In
Manchester he visited Sir Ashton Lever at Alkrington Hall.
Lever had amassed a famous collection of tribal artefacts,
shells, birds and fossils. Sadly the show was over by the time
Hutton arrived: Lever had packed it all off to London, where it
would become a notable diversion, and he would later sell it
off to resolve financial problems.
After Manchester, Hutton had a good time with friends in
Warwickshire, and further north: 'I made a lucky escape from
Warwickshire,' he told Watt, 'but in avoiding Scylla I fell into
Charibdes I was as tired of eating and drinking as a bachelor is
of fasting and a married man of kissing at home.'
In the same letter, Hutton joked about growing homunculi
'as eggs in turkey &. fir trees in a nursery', and developed
elaborate metaphors concerning machinery and sex. This kind
of stuff was common in lewd writings of the time. The Beggar's
Benison members were fond of the idea of 'Merryland', an
imaginary island that derived from English pornography, a
marvellous place whose hillocks, shrubs and grottoes provided
plenty of resource for sexual allusion. Hutton's letters show he
 CONSOLIDATION 115

was thoroughly immersed in his era's culture of sensuality:

again, so much for Playfair's upright citizen.
Hutton travelled next to Buxton, home of Erasmus Darwin,
where he was mortified to find that if not for 'the beastliness
of gluttony and the manliness of drinking' he might have met
Omai, who had been there just a week before. Omai was a
young man who had been brought back from Tahiti after
Cook's second voyage: he toured the country in the care of Sir
Joseph Banks, causing a sensation in polite society.
Desite these diversions, Hutton was glad to get back at last
to Scotland: 'I have undergone the most amazing hardships all
last summer &. harvest but at last thank God surmounting
every difficulty the devil has accumulated in the way I arrived
at the blessed place of my nativity.' But no sooner had he
arrived than he was summoned by 'an incendiary letter' from
a 'Madam Young', and off he set again to visit her at her home
in the north of Perth.
Hutton had been intrigued by experiments being performed
in Perthshire by Neil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal.
Maskelyne spent the second half of the year camped next to a
mountain called Schiehallion, the most symmetrical in
Britain. By measuring the deviation of a plumb line on the
north and south faces he hoped to prove that gravity acted here
on Earth as well as between celestial bodies - the bob was
attracted by the gravity of the mountain's mass. It had become
a fashionable adventure in polite society to visit the great
man's lodge. But though Hutton was in the area, and was
interested in the project - 'the gravitation of a mountain has
this summer been ascertained by Masculine [sic] and the
philosophers here in the North they found it 6 minutes on the
one side & on the other is 12 and they could perceive half a
minute so that there is no room for error' - he devoted his
attentions to Madam Young.
Madam Young's relationship to Hutton is not clear. She may
have been the wife of George Young, once Hutton's medical
tutor, or perhaps of his son Thomas. But polite acquaintances
don't send you 'incendiary letters', and keep you from popping
over to see the Astronomer Royal. Something of Hutton's
complicated but secretive personal life is surely showing itself
here.
Ii6 AGES IN CHAOS

Hutton finally returned to Edinburgh by late October 1774.

Back home, he missed absent friends, notably Watt, to
whom he wrote: 'I am returned to the empty place where my '
a

friends and yours should be It had been quite a tour. In

the course of a complicated six-month journey he had
travelled to Birmingham, through south, central and north
Wales and Anglesey, through Wiltshire to Bath, and to
Warwickshire and Derbyshire. This tour is Hutton's best-
documented field trip, thanks to the preservation of some
of his letters in the files of James Watt (Watt had invented
a copying machine for preserving his own correspondence).
By comparison, Hutton left no 'memorandum' at all of his
1764 jaunt in the Highlands with George Clerk-Maxwell, for
instance, as Playfair noted.
For all the exertion, he was pleased with the outcome of his
tour. 'I think I know pretty well now what England is made of
[save for] only a bit of Cornwall,' he told Clerk-Maxwell. He
had amassed much useful and specific data on basalts he found
in different parts of the country: 'The whinstone of Scotland is
also the same with the toadstone of Derbyshire, which is of
the amygdaloides species; it is also the same with the ragstone
of the south of Staffordshire, which is a simple whinstone, or
perfect trap.'
And during his trip to Wales, he had succeeded in finding
'the mark of shells ... in what may be primitive mountains'.
Hutton's fieldwork was crucial to the development of his
ideas: his 'theorising would never even have begun without
what he perceived in the rocks. Some modern commentators
have tended to dismiss Hutton as an 'armchair geologist',
spinning elaborate theories from the smoky comfort of the
Edinburgh clubs. But between 1750 and 1788 he would
journey through nearly every part of Britain, except
Cornwall, the Hebrides and north-west Scotland, and as early
as 1764 his forays into the field had become directed and
specific, as he sought evidence to support his arguments. It is
true that Hutton's theory was derived a priori from design
arguments, and even in his own time he would be criticised
for presenting insufficient evidence for his theories.
However, he clearly saw his fieldwork as a key component of
 CONSOLIDATION 117

his study. To Hutton, exploration in the field was well worth

a few pairs of breeches, and some solitary nights.
But if Hutton's theories were gradually being uplifted into
coherence and plausibility, his life and those of his Edinburgh
friends were about to be disrupted by great historical forces:
there was trouble in the colonies.
 13
'Britain derives nothing but
loss from the dominion"
Benjamin Franklin was well known in Edinburgh. He had
received a doctorate from St Andrews in February 1759, and in
1771 he paid a three-week visit to Edinburgh where he stayed
with David Hume. It is highly likely that he met Hutton on
this visit. But none of Hutton's circle could have guessed at the
immense historical responsibility soon to be thrust upon their
erudite friend.
Over the last few decades there had been a series of wars in
Europe and overseas as the great powers sought to gain
advantage over each other and to express their empire-building
ambitions. British and French troops had been clashing for
years in the American Midwest.
The Seven Years War of 1756 to 1763 was yet another messy
pan-European conflict in which several powers tried to restrict
the ambitions of Prussia's Frederick the Great. The difference
this time was that the Seven Years War ended with France and
Spain ceding most of their American territories.
The French immediately turned the loss to their advantage,
fust as they had exploited the threat to the British of the Bonnie
Prince, they now foresaw that as the American colonists no
longer needed British protection against a French presence to
the north, they would sooner or later start agitating for inde­
pendence. As early as 1764, the French began to send agents to
the colonies to help foment unrest. That unrest intensified
faster than anybody had anticipated, thanks to the cack-handed
governance of King George III and his ministers. The Boston
Tea Party was one outcome of their foolish and arbitrary
taxation policies.
In Hutton's circle there was dismay and foreboding. In 1775,
Adam Smith made a devastating and prescient critique of
Britain's handling of the issue: 'There are no colonies of which
the progress has been more rapid than that of the English in
 CONSOLIDATION 119
North America/ but thanks to its monopolistic policies
'Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion/
The unrest turned violent in April 1775, when British troops
marched into Lexington, Massachusetts, to find a hundred
local militia men drawn up to oppose them. With blood
spilled, the uprising spread quickly.
Benjamin Franklin had been central to the diplomatic and
legal manoeuvrings of the early 1770s. After being gratuitously
humiliated before the Privy Council in London, however,
Franklin's mood hardened against compromise. He returned to
America, where he helped draft the Declaration of Independence
of 1776. In 1778, he proceeded to France. Britain's long-term
enemy had soon signed alliance treaties with the United States:
it was the first time the new nation had been recognised as an
independent state. At this key moment, Franklin wore the same
velvet cloak he had worn before the hostile Privy Council in
London; his revenge was cold.
The British government tried to respond: Hutton's close
friend Adam Ferguson was sent to America as secretary to a
Peace Commission to negotiate 'Conciliatory Proposals'.
Ferguson was another relative of Joseph Black (his mother was
Black's great-aunt; later Ferguson married Black's niece).
Ferguson would make significant contributions to the discipline
of sociology, but his early life was rather more colourful. In
1745 he had joined the Black Watch as a chaplain. This
experience profoundly altered Ferguson's perspective on the
Highlanders: while others saw them as uncouth barbarians,
Ferguson recognised their sense of honour, loyalty, courage
and generosity, and compared them to Homeric warriors.
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would later incorporate many of
Ferguson's ideas into his own analysis of history, which would
subsequently be developed by Karl Marx.
The Peace Commission, however, turned out to be a disastrous
fiasco, overtaken by the fast pace of events in revolutionary
America. Besides, Ferguson himself wasn't an easy person to
make peace with: he even fell out with his old friend Adam
Smith, reconciling only when Smith was on his death bed.
American independence was finally sealed when Cornwallis
surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781. The news of this
remote disaster took thirty-seven days to reach London.
120 AGES IN CHAOS

Scotland had sent many settlers to America, and Hutton's

circle, like the rest of the nation, was divided by the news of
the loss of America. Many of Hutton's friends in the merchant
class, concerned about their material self-interest, backed the
British government, and even offered to help raise volunteer
regiments to help put down the rebellion. But David Hume's
sympathies had been entirely with the colonists: he thought
they should be allowed to govern themselves as they saw fit,
and like Adam Smith he believed that imperial possessions
would ruin Britain, both financially and morally, unless the
government turned in the direction of free trade.
Hume's writings - primarily through James Madison - had
influenced the drafting of the American Constitution. But
Hume himself did not live to see America's independence,- he
died in 1776. Adam Smith wrote of him, 'Upon the whole, I
have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his
death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise
and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will
permit.' James Boswell, visiting Edinburgh at the time of
Hume's death, inspected his open grave, and watched the
funeral from behind a wall. He decided to go to the library to
study some of Hume's writings as a mark of respect - but on
the way he was distracted by an encounter with a young lady,
and the great man's works were left, for that day, undisturbed.

Despite the turmoil, Hutton's life in Edinburgh had become

settled and happy. Now in his fifties, he would dine on
Sundays at Adam Smith's, and fortnightly at the home of Lord
Monboddo. Monboddo was a judge some years older than
Hutton who would become an early supporter and friend
of Robert Burns. William Smellie was another regular at
Monboddo's dinners. The son of a stonemason, by 1771
Smellie had become the editor of the first edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, a project he approached with 'a pair
of scissors' and considerable acumen.
By 1778 Hutton had become well enough established in
Edinburgh circles to set up his own gentlemen's club, the
Oyster Club. He, Joseph Black and Adam Smith were its
founder members, and in the years that followed the club
became very popular. At its weekly meetings, over tankards of
 CONSOLIDATION 121
porter and feasts of oysters - a fashionable delicacy - 'the
conversation was always free, often scientific, but never
didactic or disputatious; and as this club was much the resort
of the strangers who visited Edinburgh, from any object
connected with art or with science, it derived from thence an
extraordinary degree of variety and interests.' Members of a
new generation were among the luminaries of the Oyster Club
- including Hutton's companions at Siccar Point a decade later.
Sir James Hall was the son of Sir John Hall of Dunglass,
Hutton's old friend from his farming days. Hall acceded to his
father's baronetcy on the latter's death in 1776, becoming Sir
James as a boy of fifteen. After studying at the university under
Black and others, Hall became an able chemist, and would be
fascinated by the notion of testing geological ideas in the
laboratory. In the 1780s, following the custom of the time, the
young Hall undertook a Grand Tour of Europe, during which
he investigated the great volcanoes of Italy, including Vesuvius,
then actually erupting. In Edinburgh's National Portrait Gallery
you can see a portrait of Hall painted in Rome at the end of
this tour: the twenty-five-year-old has a broad, determined face
and lively eyes under a mane of prematurely receding blond
hair. It is quite a contrast to the portrait of Hall in old age
which hangs in the lobby of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in
which the great scientist broods ferociously over a book.
Thirty-five years younger than Hutton, Hall would neverthe­
less become a close friend - surely a mark of Hutton's warmth
and lack of envy.
John Playfair was born in 1748: the son of a minister from
Dundee, he was educated at home by his father, and then sent
to Edinburgh to qualify himself for the church. Mathematics
proved more conducive to Playfair's mind than religion, but
when his father died in 1772, Playfair succeeded to his father's
parish in Dundee. Ten years later, however, he gave up his
church livings. For a time he made a living as a private tutor,
and in 1785 he would be appointed professor of mathematics
at the University of Edinburgh. Playfair would< gain a
reputation in mathematics, the history of science and geology
- but his chief claim to fame is as Hutton's Boswell, translat­
ing (and sometimes refashioning) his friend's thoughts for later
generations.
122 AGES IN CHAOS

The Rev. William Robertson, an intimate of Hume's, was

another pearl of the Oyster Club. Once one of Maclaurin's
volunteers in the 'Forty-Five, Robertson became 'Historio­
grapher Royal', led the Moderate Party in the General
Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and was principal of tlie
University of Edinburgh for thirty years. He was a talented
writer: his histories of Charles V, America, India and other
subjects won plaudits from such luminaries as Voltaire and
Catherine the Great. Hutton would later turn to Robertson for
advice on the drafting of his first formal presentation of his
geological theory.
Adding to this rich mix was a Russian princess. Catherina
Romanova Vorontsov Dashkov was a friend of Diderot and
Voltaire. She spent some time in Edinburgh, living at
Holyroodhouse, and described the Edinburgh luminaries as
'esteemed for their intelligence, intellectual distinction and
moral qualities'. There were many links between Russian and
British scientific circles: in 1783 Joseph Black would be elected
an Honorary Member of the St Petersburg Imperial Academy
of Sciences, and in 1818, the Russians would try to recruit the
geological map-maker William Smith to supervise the immense
coal industry in the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Watt's career had blossomed. In 1776 the first
two Watt engines were installed to pump water for a
Staffordshire colliery and to blow air into the furnaces of
ironmaster John Wilkinson. Watt continued to improve his
designs. He introduced the 'double-acting' engine in which
steam was applied alternately to both sides of the piston,
thereby doubling the power obtainable from the same size of
cylinder. And in 1782 he took out a patent for a new engine in
which a rocking beam drove a shaft and flywheel: Watt now
had an engine capable of driving machinery. In the mines,
everything would change: lifts could now lower workers to the
coalfaces and haul their coal back to the surface again.
Watt's breakthroughs gave him a monopoly over British
steam-engine design for a quarter of a century. At last he was
doing well financially, and in 1785 he would be elected a
member of the Royal Society in London. Watt always retained
his contacts with Edinburgh, however. He wrote to Black:
'Everybody here who knows [you] would be happy to see you
 CONSOLIDATION 123
and I hope you will bring Dr Hutton with you, perhaps we may
find some stone for him and our iron works would please you
both.' But Hutton was too settled in Edinburgh; he did not
visit Birmingham again. In 1778 he did receive Erasmus
Darwin as a visitor, but it was not a happy occasion. Darwin's
son Charles, another Edinburgh medical student, had died of
an infection from a cut finger. Darwin stayed with Hutton
until after the funeral.
Hutton had also kept busy with many commercial projects.
His sal ammoniac factory was still in operation, and diversify­
ing: in 1783 it would begin to process crude sal ammoniac
bought in from a tar works at Culross. Hutton also experi­
mented with varnishes. There was a great demand for varnish
to protect ironwork and for domestic articles and ornaments:
Watt's financial partner Matthew Boulton turned out a variety
of varnished fancy goods - which Hutton called 'beads,
jinkumbobs & little Jesuses'. The beads were much valued by
explorers like Cook as trade goods. In Birmingham and
Wolverhampton the manufacturers of an imitation oriental
lacquer were experimenting with coal tar as a base, but this
caused noxious fumes. Hutton tried using coal rather than coal
tar in this process, and corresponded with Watt over the issue.
In this enterprise at least he seems to have been unsuccessful.

Whatever other interests he pursued, Hutton always continued

to geologise.
He had no formal connection with the university, but would
freely use his rock collection to assist enthusiastic students.
One wrote of him, 'He is an excellent mineralogist, and is very
communicative, very clear, and of a candid though quick
temper. He has a noble collection of [rock samples], which he
likes to show.' Another of these students had Christmas
dinner with Black and Hutton: '[Black] himself is so lazy he is
obliged to get Dr Hutton to be master of all the ceremonial
part. The Doctor likes to sleep after dinner.'
Hutton also showed his collection to visiting scholars. But
this led him into a somewhat embarrassing confrontation with
the prominent French geologist Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-
Fond, who toured Scotland in 1784.
Faujas had been a lawyer and a commissioner of mines before
124 AGES IN CHAOS

becoming geology professor at Paris's natural history museum.

He visited the Western Isles, where he studied columnar
basalts at Fingal's Cave, comparing them with similar
formations in France. In Edinburgh Adam Smith invited the
Frenchman, known for his love of music, to a bagpipe competi­
tion. Faujas described how 'the competitors ... formed
themselves into a line two deep, and marched in that order to
the castle of Edinburgh, which is built on a volcanic rock' (as
indeed it is).
Hutton proudly showed off his rock collection to the visitor.
But Faujas noted that the samples lacked the rock matrices in
which they had been found, so reducing their value. 'I there­
fore had much more pleasure in conversing with this modest
philosopher than in examining his collection' (my emphasis).
The snooty Gaul was more impressed, in fact, by Black, who
he called a 'learned chymist'.
Modest philosopher or not, by now Hutton was doing some
very deep thinking about his geology. Throughout his
Edinburgh years the core of his theory of the Earth had never
wavered in Hutton's mind. He had sought to flesh it out with
new data and evidence, which he had found in the field, and
with theoretical concepts that he found in the prolific thinking
of his friends, notably Black, Watt and Hume.
Hume's work inspired Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy,
and was one of the influences that led Auguste Comte to
positivism. In Britain, he would influence Bentham, Mill and
others. Hume's empiricism, proposing that all knowledge must
be based on experience, and his scepticism, holding that we
must always be aware of the discrepancy between what we
claim to be capable of and what we are, would have a great
influence on later generations. His overriding lesson for
thinkers like Hutton was that scientists, even those occupied
by an apparently 'concrete' discipline like geology, need to be
careful not just about what they claim to know but also about
how they claim to know it. Human reason is a fragile thing
and prone to be overthrown by suggestibility.
It was a lesson Hutton learned very well. Hutton was wary
of the wild and undisciplined speculation with which those
who had become known as 'system-builders' had tarnished
geological thinking. As Playfair wrote, such geologists were
 CONSOLIDATION 125
'men often but ill-informed of the phenomena which they
proposed to explain, and who proceeded also on the supposi­
tion that they could give an account of the origin of things ...
Men who guided their inquiries by a principle so inconsistent
with the limits of the human faculties, could never bring their
speculations to a satisfactory conclusion.' This had rendered
Burnet's schema, for example, no more than a 'poetic fiction'.
If Hutton was to avoid being accused of the same groundless
confabulating, he came to see, it wasn't enough just to set out
his geological knowledge: he would have to demonstrate how
he had obtained his knowledge about places and times unseen
- and Hume's empirical, observation-driven philosophy, fused
with the Newton-Maclaurin tradition, would be crucial to this
project.
Hutton's geological ideas, however, remained far from the
contemporary mainstream. By the 1780s, the ideas of Abraham
Werner dominated European geology. Werner was a practical
man and a good teacher: a professor at a mining academy in
Saxony, he attracted students from all over Europe. He
published little on his theory, but his lectures, which he began
to give in Freiburg in 1775, were immensely influential, and soon
his students were taking his message across the Continent.
And Werner, like many of his predecessors, believed in
deposition from a primordial ocean.
Werner argued that the Earth had originally consisted of a
primeval nucleus completely enclosed by some universal
liquid - perhaps water. Earth's rocks precipitated out of this
fluid; as time passed the composition of the fluid somehow
changed, and hence the nature of the rocks differed, one layer
on top of another - which explained the orderly layering of the
strata now being mapped out in the field.
The earliest 'Primitive' rocks were granite, and also gneiss,
schist and quartz, and, since they were formed in a period
before life, they were devoid of fossils. Next the fluid levels
lowered and the continents emerged. The rocks formed in this
'Transition' era were a mixture of sediments and precipitates
and therefore contained some fossils. In the final, modern era,
much of the fluid had drained away, leaving the modern oceans.
Rocks formed in this period, the 'Floetz' - like mudstone and
sandstone - were created by erosion and were full of fossils.
126 AGES IN CHAOS

The last layer of all was alluvial,, the loose deposits of gravel, sand
and clay formed from the most recent erosion of older rocks.
Fluid was so important in this argument that the theory was
known as 'Neptunist', after the god of the sea. Even basalts
were considered to have crystallised from the primordial fluid.
Only those few rocks, lavas and volcanic ashes that were
known by observation to have erupted from volcanoes, were
thought to have originated from subterranean fires - which
were believed to be burning banks of underground coal.
All this was familiar to Hutton. Many of these ideas had
been prefigured by François Rouelle, who may have taught
Hutton in Paris, and who had first proposed that granite was a
primitive rock precipitated out of a universal ocean. Werner's
theory had all the old problems - such as, where had all the
primeval fluid gone? But it made a firm prediction, that the
same kinds of rocks should have been laid down in the same
sequence all over the world, and this had encouraged
geologists to make careful studies of the rocks. Out of this
would come the first attempts at 'stratigraphy' - that is,
mapping the Earth's strata as they were actually to be found in
the ground, and trying to figure out their history.
Meanwhile, there had been increasing disquiet about the
Earth's true age. As the real history of the Earth was
uncovered, fragment by fragment, by the patient work of field
geologists, it became increasingly difficult to imagine that the
many mighty events documented in the rocks could all have
been crammed into the brief Ussher time frame. The geologist
Charles Lyell, writing in 1830, would say this was like trying
to squeeze the events of a thousand years of human history
into a mere century: 'Armies and fleets would appear to be
assembled only to be destroyed, and cities built merely to fall
into ruins.'
Werner himself did not buy the Ussher chronology. He was
actually a Deist whose thinking mirrored Hutton's to some
extent: the Earth's rocks were the product of rational, goal-
oriented processes that showed the working of God's hand, but
the literal descriptions of Genesis could be ignored. He guessed it
was perhaps a million years ago that his primeval ocean covered
the Earth. But Werner kept such thinking private; the whiff of
atheism still hung around any attempts to dispute Ussher.
 CONSOLIDATION 127
By 1785 Werner's ideas had dominated for a decade - and he
was twenty-three years younger than Hutton. There was still
no viable theoretical alternative to their ocean-deposition-and-
decay model of Earth's history.
None apart from Hutton's, that is.
Having toyed with his theory of the Earth for perhaps
twenty-five years, Hutton was now nearing sixty - but he had
still to present his theory formally, or even properly to write it
down. According to Playfair he had communicated it only to
his friends Black and Clerk of Eldin, and 'though fortified in
his opinion by their agreement with him (and it was the agree­
ment of men eminently qualified to judge), yet he was in no
haste to publish his theory,- for he was one of those who are
much more delighted with the contemplation of truth, than
with the praise of having discovered it.' He was not a pro­
fessional academic, and so there was no need to publish. And
perhaps Hutton, knowing how far he had strayed from the
prevailing paradigms, feared for the future of his precious
theory once it was exposed to the full glare of scrutiny, beyond
the cosy circles of his Edinburgh friends.
Now, though, he came under pressure to publish for the first
time.

In the 1780s the Scottish Enlightenment was at its peak.

World-renowned figures thronged Edinburgh's clubs and
societies, and the classes at its universities in medicine and
science were among the best in the world; by the end of the
century Edinburgh had more students than Oxford and
Cambridge put together. Now was the time, it was decided, to
set up an enduring intellectual monument to this golden age.
All around Europe, new institutions devoted to the sciences
and the arts were being established. These could be traced
back to the Italian Academies of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The Royal Society of London had been founded in
1660, and on 1 March 1665 it had begun the publication of its
Philosophical Transactions, a series which continues to the
present day. Shortly, the Royal Irish Academy and the French
Academy of Sciences were to be established. But, a century
after London, what of Edinburgh?
It would be nice to report that the founding of the new Royal
128 AGES IN CHAOS

Society of Edinburgh was the outcome of civilised and sedate

discussions. In fact it was born of jealousy, turf warfare and
bitterness,- even founders of Royal Societies are human.
It seems entirely appropriate that a nucleus for Edinburgh's
new institution should have been a gentleman's club: the
Rankenian, formed in 1716 for 'literary social meetings' held
in Ranken's Inn. The Rankenian lasted sixty years, and counted
Colin Maclaurin among its alumni. Maclaurin, of course, had
also been responsible for establishing the Philosophical Society
in 1737. But the Philosophical Society was a small, not well-
organised voluntary body, and with the passing of time it had
become lifeless and uncertain. There was clearly a gap to be
filled.
In 1782, the recently formed Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland stepped into this vacuum. The antiquarians proposed
to seek a Royal Charter, to cultivate knowledge not just of
antiquities but of other areas, including natural history,- they
even proposed setting up a natural history museum. This pro­
voked an instant reaction from the University of Edinburgh,
who feared that the proposed lectures would rival its own, and
from the Faculty of Advocates, who worried that the new
museum would compete with its own library, which housed
antiquarian objects as well as books and manuscripts.
John Walker, professor of natural history at the University,
was particularly concerned about the antiquarians stepping on
his turf. In that same year of 1782, he drew up a 'proposal for
establishing at Edinburgh, a Society for the Advancement of
Learning and Useful Knowledge'. The University, the Faculty
of Advocates, and the Philosophical and Antiquarian Societies
would unite to form a Royal Society of Edinburgh under a
Charter from the King. Walker's tactic, aimed at protecting his
own professional interests, was to bring the antiquarians to
heel. The antiquarians would have none of it, and after three
months of acrimonious meetings they left the proposed
coalition. But by the end of the year a petition had been sent
to London, by 29 March 1783 the King's signature had been
secured, and Walker had achieved his aim.
The new Royal Society of Edinburgh rapidly organised itself.
The first assembly included Robertson, Walker, Adam Ferguson
and Adam Smith. The fellows of the old Philosophical Society
 CONSOLIDATION 129
were subsumed as fellows of the Royal Society, so that Hutton
became a Founding Fellow. The fellows were organised into a
Literary Class and a Physical Class, the latter including
Hutton, Watt, Clerk of Eldin, Hall and others. One of the first
honorary fellows was Benjamin Franklin, and the Society's
first councillors included John Maclaurin, son of Colin. (John
Maclaurin - who would go on to become a judge - had a less
reputable side. Since 1760 he had been publishing bawdy
satirical verse, beginning with The Keekeiad, an epic poem
about a citizen of Edinburgh who set his unfortunate wife's
pubic hair on fire.)
The first meetings were held in the University Library. The
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh would soon
begin to disseminate the Society's learning - although in those
early days there were some puzzling omissions. A debate
conducted between Hall and Hutton during 1788 and 1791,
weighing the merits of the old phlogiston theory against those
of Lavoisier's ideas on combustion, was never published: as the
Council said in the first volume, 'Several papers have been
communicated with the sole purpose of furnishing an occasional
entertainment to the members, and this end being attained,
have been withdrawn by the authors.'
For the Edinburgh luminaries, the founding of the Society was
a statement of intellectual independence and, perhaps, of national
pride: seventy-six years after the Act of Union, the Society was
a much more meaningful declaration of nationhood than the
Bonnie Prince's war-making.
Now, at last, prompted by his 'zeal for supporting a recent
institution which he thought of importance to the progress of
science in his country' - as Playfair would say - Hutton felt
ready to give his precious ideas their first public presentation.
But, in swimming so hard against the prevailing tide, he knew
that he would have to work hard to establish his arguments.
Nervously, Hutton began to go through his notes and samples.
 'We have now got to the end
of our reasoning"
Hutton's oral presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh
was given in two parts, on 7 March and 4 April 1785. Hutton
was ill that March day, and the first part of his paper was read
in his absence by Joseph Black.
We must imagine Hutton's emotions as he prepared to
present his ideas before an audience of his peers, those whose
opinions mattered more to him than anybody else's in the
world. Even Playfair, who was in the audience, had not heard
a full presentation before. And we must imagine Black's precise,
clipped voice as he began, on behalf of his friend: 'When we
trace the parts of which this terrestrial system is composed,
and when we view the general connection of those several
parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction
by which it is adapted to a certain end. We perceive a fabric,
erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power
that is apparent in the production of it ...'

Before he could get to the theory proper, Hutton had to tell

his audience how to think about geological problems: 'If, in
pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in
forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on
which Science may form just conclusions, we should not
long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history
of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and
not evidence, has decided: For in no subject is there naturally
less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by
prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to
employ that light by which they should have seen the system
of the world ...'
Hutton would not publish his theory on the nature of
knowledge until 1794, but when he did, it would become
apparent that he had worked out his own empiricism, quite
 CONSOLIDATION 131
similar to that of Hume. Where Hume had talked of the
difference between impressions and ideas, so Hutton split up
the thought process into three stages. In sensation the mind
receives a stimulus from some external agent through the
senses; in perception the sensations are compared and
organised; in conception general ideas like space, time, motion
are derived from perceptions.
In the end, said Hume, all knowledge originates in experi­
ence,- everything else you have to infer. And that was how
Hutton had come to think about geology. Geology deals with
the interior of the Earth, the depths of the sea - even the deep
past and far future - all places we cannot directly observe. How
can we have knowledge of something we have never examined?
Just as Hume argued, we have to begin with experience, with
sensation - or as Playfair put it, inquiries had to be consistent
with 'the limits of human faculties'. We can look only at the
rocks in the present, on the surface of the Earth or in the
laboratory, and we can observe only the processes acting on
them in the present - like erosion.
How do you infer the past from what you see in the present?
'In examining things present, we have data from which to
reason with regard to what has been,- and, from what has
actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that
which is to happen hereafter. Therefore, upon the supposition
that the operations of nature are equable and steady, we find,
in natural appearances, means for concluding a certain portion
of time to have necessarily elapsed, in the production of those
events of which we see the effects' (my emphasis).
Hutton assumed that the same processes you see today
must have been working on the rocks in the past, and will
continue to do so in the future - and, building on that, you can
reconstruct what must have been in the past. All you have to
do is run the tape backwards from the present. Thus we can
deduce that the Edinburgh hills were once the hearts of mighty
volcanoes, before erosion did its work.
This is only a conception. You can't prove that physical laws
never changed - perhaps the force of gravity varied a million
years ago, perhaps the boiling point of water was different -
but if you do assume that the same forces acting now have
always acted, you have a way to unlock history. Later
132 AGES IN CHAOS

elaborated by Charles Lyell under the label of 'uniformi­

tarianism', this assumption lets us reconstruct history, and
even project the future, based on the world as we find it today
and the processes that have shaped it: 'The present is the key
to the past,' as geologist Archibald Geikie would say a century
later.
This was little understood at the time. Hutton's statement
of his epistemological thinking was too brief. Even his 1794
book on the subject, when it eventually appeared, was pretty
impenetrable, and its links to his geology were obscure: it has
taken detective work by modern scholars to make it all clear.
But this aspect of Hutton's work was crucially important. By
separating his observations from his inferences, Hutton was
trying to explain the basis on which he had derived his
hypotheses, and by opening up his methodology for exami­
nation he was setting out his thinking as a basis for a true
science of geology in the future - for that methodology itself
could be improved.
The notion of uniformitarianism is one of Hutton's key
contributions to geology. Hutton gave us more than a theory of
the Earth. He gave us a way to think about geology, a way
whose influence persists to this day.
But enough epistemology. Now, perhaps with relish, Hutton
turned to the rocks.

How were sedimentary rocks formed? You could see from

their cemented-together composition of grains and rubble
and fossils that they had been put together from the products
of erosion, and their fossil content showed they had formed
under the sea: 'If, for example, in a mass of marble, taken
from a quarry upon the top of the Alps or Andes, there shall
be found once cockle-shell, or piece of coral, it must be con­
cluded, that this bed of stone had been originally formed at
the bottom of the sea, as much as another bed which is
evidently composed almost altogether of cockle-shells and
coral.'
It was easy to imagine great layers of rubble being formed as
the rivers washed debris into the ocean. But what could have
consolidated the strata into rock? Werner's model had all the
rocks being separated out of solution in the waters of a mighty
 CONSOLIDATION 133
ocean, and that was that. But that wasn't good enough: not
everything dissolves in water (or indeed, any other solvent).
Rocks had been found bound together by such substances as
feldspar and metals, none of which were soluble in water. Water
simply wouldn't do as an explanation, unless you ascribed un­
observed powers to it: 'We cannot allow more power to water
than we find it has in nature; nor are we to imagine to our­
selves unlimited powers in bodies, on purpose to explain those
appearances, by which we should be made to know the powers
of nature.'
Equally, if the rocks had been deposited out of a solution
you ought to find strata being laid down in simple ways, one
on top of the other. But there were some very peculiar rock
specimens to be found in the field. Hutton had a piece of
granite from Portsoy (actually brought back by John Clerk of
Eldin) that contained crystalline structures of quartz and
feldspar embedded within each other: 'The feldspar, which is
contained within the quartz, contains also a small triangle of
quartz, which it incloses.' So the feldspar and the quartz were
nested like Russian dolls. (This complex interweaving of
mineral types reminded Hutton of handwriting, and the
granite type is still called 'graphic'.) How could the two
mineral types have got so mixed up if they had been laid
down out of a solution? Wouldn't one precipitate out first,
and then the other?
But on the other hand, if the two mineral types had once
been molten, they could easily have both solidified out of the
melt in the jumbled way shown in Hutton's samples. 'The
loose and discontinuous body of a stratum may be closed by
means of softness and compression,- the porous structure of the
materials may be consolidated, in a similar manner, by the
fusion of their substance; and foreign matter may be intro­
duced into the open structure of strata, in form of steam or
exhalation, as well as in the fluid state of fusion,- consequently,
heat is an agent competent for the consolidation of strata,
which water alone is not.' Hutton turned out to be right about
the heat origin of his graphic granite, although it was not until
1986 that samples were artificially produced in the laboratory,
by allowing quartz and feldspar simultaneously to crystallise
out of a melt.
134 AGES IN CHAOS

Another piece of evidence for the action of heat was the

cracks that could be observed in the strata: 'If, again, strata
have been consolidated by means of heat, acting in such a
manner as to soften their substance, then, in cooling, they
must have formed rents or separations of their substance, by
the unequal degrees of contraction which the contiguous
strata may have suffered ... There is not in nature any appear­
ance more distinct than this of the perpendicular fissures and
separations in strata. These are generally known to workmen
by the terms of veins or backs and cutters; and there is no
consolidated stratum that wants these appearances.'
In these remarks, Hutton knew he was directly taking on
Werner and his disciples. Granite, so the Wernerians claimed,
was 'primitive', the oldest rock of all, the first laid down out of
the universal fluid. Now Hutton was saying it was in fact one
of the youngest of rocks, and that under the influence of great
heat it had once flowed like melted chocolate. But as he
developed his argument, he was in any case challenging the
whole notion of primary and secondary rocks: 'We are not at
present to enter into any discussion with regard to what are
the primary and secondary mountains of the Earth; we are not
to consider what is the first, and what the last, in those things
which now are seen ...'
Hutton bombarded his audience with more examples to
reinforce his case that heat, not water, was responsible for
forming rocks. He referred to 'hand specimens' from his own
collection: 'Here, for example, are crystallized together in one
mass, first, Pyrites, containing sulphur, iron, copper,- secondly,
Blend, a composition of iron, sulphur, and calamine,- thirdly,
Galena, consisting of lead and sulphur ... All these bodies, each
possessing its proper shape, are mixed in such a manner as it
would be endless to describe, but which may be expressed in
general by saying, that they are mutually contained in, and
contain each other.' He described the rock salt deposit he had
found with Watt in Cheshire in 1774, the great marl-stained
onion-shell mass which showed clear signs of having congealed
from a melt. He referred to nodules in the basalts of Calton Hill,
one of Edinburgh's volcanic plugs. He described the chalk belts
of the Isle of Wight which he had viewed during his agricultural
training days, which show different degrees of consolidation.
 CONSOLIDATION 135
He talked about a species of marble from Spain, in which the
constituent fragments fit together as neatly as the bony plates
of a skull: 'The gravel of which this marble is composed, con­
sists of fragments of other marbles of different kinds ... Besides
the general conformation of those hard bodies, so as to be
perfectly adapted to each other's shape, there is, in some
places, a mutual indentation of the different pieces of gravel
into each other; an indentation which resembles perfectly that
junction of the different bones of the cranium, called sutures,
and which must have necessarily required a mixture of those
bodies while in a soft or fluid state.'
And then there was basalt. Hutton described intrusions of
one rock type into another. There was the monolithic slab of
basalt he had first observed at Crieff in 1764. The 'dyke' (an
intrusion that cut across the strata) had been left exposed and
sticking up into the air when the softer rocks within which it
had formed had worn away. 'It runs from [Crieff] eastward, and
would seem to be the same with that which crosses the river
Tay, in forming Campsy-lin above Stanley, as a lesser one of
the same kind does below it ... It may be considered as having
been traced for twenty or thirty miles, and westwards to
Drummond castle, perhaps much farther.' Similarly, the
Salisbury Crags of Arthur's Seat were a 'sill', where the basalt
has run parallel to the older strata.
How could such formations occur? If sufficiently heated,
rocks melt, to form magma. If magma reaches the surface it is
called a lava flow - but if it is formed underground it can be
forced into fissures in older, solid rocks. Hutton also quoted
the practical experience of miners. Sometimes prospectors
could find intrusions of the minerals they sought at right
angles to the surrounding strata. How could these vertical
intrusions have got there, unless molten material had been
forced into strata already formed?
This, said Hutton, was how sedimentary rocks were formed:
layers of rubble, laced with the relics of living things, were laid
down on the bottom of the sea, and then the Earth's inner heat
baked them into rock. Sometimes the same heat drove great
veins of lava or minerals into pre-formed strata.
But how were the newly created rocks raised from the bottom
of the sea, to be transformed into plains and mountains?
136 AGES IN CHAOS

Great violence has been done to the Earth.

In some places on the planet, great successions of strata lie
undisturbed. The Grand Canyon is one example. If you were to
climb the walls of one of those great water-carved gullies, you
would be climbing up through more than five hundred million
years of geological time, neatly stacked like typing paper.
But as Hutton knew, such places are rare: Scotland certainly
isn't like that. Instead, 'The strata of the globe are actually
found in every possible position: Far from horizontal, they are
frequently found vertical; from continuous, they are broken
and separated in every possible direction; and, from a plane,
they are bent and doubled.'
Then there was uplift.
Hutton had a scrap of fossil wood with an extraordinary
history. The wood must obviously have come from a tree that
had grown on dry land. But you could see that 'it has been
eaten and perforated by those sea worms which destroy the
bottom of our ships'. So after it had grown, the relic had been
carried beneath the sea. Finally, petrified, the scrap had been
raised above the sea once more, to finish its journey on the Isle
of Sheppey, where Hutton found it. This unassuming bit of
wood was evidence that the land had gone through a great
cycle, of erosion, consolidation, and uplift: it had been carried
through a mighty revolution in the Earth.
To Hutton this was evidence that great energies slumbered
within the Earth. For another demonstration, Hutton pointed
again to the existence of mineral veins running through rocks:
'Let us ... consider what power would be required to force up,
from the most unfathomable depth of the ocean, to the Andes
or the Alps, a column of fluid metal and of stone. This power
cannot be much less than that required to elevate the highest
land upon the globe.'
As the engine of uplift, Hutton settled on Earth's internal
heat. The planet was a mighty heat engine, turning thermal
energy into mechanical energy with the alacrity of one of James
Watt's giant kettles. And the heat provided the energy required
not only to bake rocks but also to uplift landscapes and mineral
seams.
Hutton gave several examples of inner heat. Volcanoes were
 CONSOLIDATION 137
found everywhere: 'Naturalists, in examining different
countries, have discovered the most undoubted proofs of many
ancient volcanoes, which had not been before suspected. Thus,
volcanoes will appear to be not a matter of accident, or as only
happening in an particular place, they are general to the globe,
so far as there is no place upon the Earth that may not have an
eruption of this kind; although it is by no means necessary for
every place to have had those eruptions.'
On an Earth made for a purpose, however, volcanoes were
part of the grand design. Echoing Strabo, he said: 'A volcano is
not made on purpose to frighten superstitious people into fits
of piety and devotion, nor to overwhelm devoted cities with
destruction; a volcano should be considered as a spiracle to the
subterranean furnace, in order to prevent the unnecessary
elevation of land, and fatal effects of earthquakes.'
While it might be difficult to imagine the formation of
sedimentary rocks, Hutton said, the fact of the subterranean
heat engine ought to be obvious to all: 'To see the evidence of
marble, a body that is solid, having been formed of loose
materials collected at the bottom of the sea, is not always easy
... But when fire bursts forth from the bottom of the sea, and
when the land is heaved up and down, so as to demolish cities .
in an instant, and split asunder rocks and solid mountains, there
is nobody but must see in this a power, which may be suffi­
cient to accomplish every view of nature in erecting land, as it
is situated in the place most advantageous for that purpose.'
But what was heat? In the absence of a developed physical
theory, to flesh out his geological model Hutton had been
forced to develop his own ideas - ideas that would later get
him into a great deal of trouble. And confusingly enough,
Hutton's theory of heat, as he had eventually developed it, was
neither a modern atomic theory nor a contemporary caloric
one.
Hutton imagined that light, heat and electricity all came
from the sun - all 'modifications of the solar substance' - and
they lacked mass and weight. So Hutton's heat was'1 not like
caloric, which was supposed to have a weight. Rather, Hutton
thought that 'The solar substance, when compounded in an
inflammable body, is phlogiston; and when restored to its
former liberty, to its natural motion, it is light.'
138 AGES IN CHAOS

Phlogiston was a hypothetical substance which was

supposed to be part of every combustible material. When you
burned something, phlogiston was driven off, with the
'dephlogisticated' substance left as a residue - thus unbuxnt
wood was actually made up of ash and phlogiston. Hutton was
probably attracted to such theories because of his farming
experience. He had seen plants grow in sunlight; he believed
that plants used 'solar substance' in the form of light to make
organic matter and phlogiston, and animals' digestion of plant
material released the phlogiston, turning it back into light - a
kind of mirror image of the oxygen-based physiological cycle
we understand now.
However, the phlogiston theory was discredited by Antoine
Lavoisier, between 1770 and 1790. He showed that burning
actually involves combination with the newly discovered
element, oxygen. So even by the time of Hutton's presentation,
phlogiston theories were seriously old-fashioned. One of
Hutton's failings, as Playfair would admit, was that he didn't
always read as widely as he should have. While he devoured
books on 'voyages, travels, and books relating to the natural
history of the Earth', he 'bestowed but little attention on
books of opinion and theory ... he was not very anxious ... to
be informed of the views which other philosophers had taken
of the same subject. He was but little disposed to concede
anything to mere authority; and to his indifference about the
opinions of former theorists, it is probable that his own
speculations owed some part, both of their excellencies, and
their defects.' On the issue of phlogiston, he had simply let
himself get out of date.
All this was heady stuff - but how did it apply to Hutton's
theory of the Earth?
Hutton imagined a closed system inside the Earth -
something like modern hydraulic machinery. His heat, as
the working fluid, circulated endlessly, melting the rocks
and pushing up the land. It was just like a steam engine,
with the steam circulating to push the pistons and drive the
wheels.
Where had the interior heat come from? Hutton didn't know
- but he believed it didn't matter, as the system was closed; the
store of heat fluid would have been created with the Earth
 CONSOLIDATION 139
itself, and had remained unchanged ever since. He argued that
the fact that he could not identify its source was not a valid
objection: 'In opposition to this conclusion, it will not be
allowed to allege, that we are ignorant how such a power
might be exerted under the bottom of the ocean; for the
present question is not, what had been the cause of heat,
which has appeared to have been produced in that place; but,
if this power of heat, which has certainly been exerted at the
bottom of the ocean for consolidating strata, had been
employed also for another purpose, that is, for raising those
strata into the place of land.'
So the present-day lands had been created from the rubble of
older landscapes, consolidated and uplifted by heat. But what
was this great cycling world-machine for? Hutton's final remarks
were his most visionary, as he moved to unite his arguments
in a new image of the Earth on which we live.

The purpose of Earth, said Hutton, was to sustain life.

He recalled his paradox of the soil. Erosion creates soil,
which is the basis of all life. On a world like Werner's,
dominated only by erosion, the destruction of soil and
mountains must soon bring an end to the Earth as a habitable
world. But Hutton had observed a process of renovation:
'Nature does not destroy a continent from having wearied of
a subject which had given pleasure, or changed her purpose,
whether for a better or a worse; neither does she erect a
continent of land among the clouds, to shew her power, or to
amaze the vulgar man ... But with such wisdom has nature
ordered things in the ceconomy of this world, that the
destruction of one continent is not brought about without
the renovation of the Earth in the production of another.'
This was intended for the preservation of life through the
creation of soil: 'A soil, adapted to the growth of plants,
is necessarily prepared, and carefully preserved; and in the
necessary waste of land which is inhabited, the foundation is
laid for future continents, in order to support the system of
this living world.'
All this needed time, of course - but how much time? 'The
formation of a future Earth being in the bottom of the ocean,
at depths unfathomable to man,' is unobservable. 'But, in the
140 AGES IN CHAOS

destruction of the present Earth, we have a process that is

performed within the limits of our observation ... But how
shall we measure the decrease of our land? Every revolution of
the globe wears away some part of some rock upon some coast;
but the quantity of that decrease, in that measured time, is not
a measurable thing ...'
Hutton had claimed that the only processes that have
shaped the Earth in the past are those working in the present
day, such as erosion. Those effects are feeble in themselves,
but Hutton assumed that The natural operations of the Earth,
continued in a sufficient space of time, would be adequate to
the effects which we observe' (my emphasis). That is, if you
have slow-working processes, you need to allow huge amounts
of time to allow them to wreak mighty changes.
A human lifespan was too short to allow precise measurements
of such slow processes. Even a reference to the observation of
the ancients, across thousands of years, was of no help: 'Let us
then go to the Romans and the Greeks in search of a measure
of our coasts, which we may compare with the present state of
things. Here, again, we are disappointed; their descriptions of
the shores of Greece and of Italy, and their works upon the
coast, either give no measure of a decrease, or are not accurate
enough for such a purpose.'
A geological cycle was long, enormously long - how long
couldn't be determined. But if the change was difficult to
measure even on intervals dating back to the ancients, time
must be vastly deeper than Ussher's paltry few millennia. 'We
are certain, that all the coasts of the present continents are
wasted by the sea, and constantly wearing away upon the
whole; but this operation is so extremely slow, that we cannot
find a measure of the quantity in order to form an estimate.
Therefore, the present continents of the Earth, which we
consider as in a state of perfection, would, in the natural
operations of the globe, require a time indefinite for their
destruction ...'
And if there had been one cycle, there must have been many
more. 'The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials,
not of the Earth which was the immediate predecessor of the
present, but of the Earth which, in ascending from the present,
we consider as the third, and which had preceded the land that
 CONSOLIDATION 141
was above the surface of the sea, while our present land was
yet beneath the water of the ocean. Here are three distinct
successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our
measurement of time, a thing of indefinite duration/
In his sometimes tangled prose, Hutton was pointing out
that if the present-day mountains had been formed from the
rubble of a previous cycle, then the mountains of that cycle
must have been formed from the wreckage of an even earlier
cycle - and so on.
A central theme of all Hutton's thinking about physics was
that the universe was filled with two kinds of forces: attractive
and repulsive. In Newton's orderly solar system, inertia was
the 'repulsive' force which tends to pull a planet from its path,
but this was matched by gravity, the 'attractive' force, and the
balance kept the planet on its circular course. In Hutton's
Earth, the attractive force was gravity, which acted to pull
everything towards the centre of the planet. The repulsive
force was heat, which pushed up the land. As in any well-
balanced system the repulsive and attractive forces oscillated,
keeping in overall equilibrium - which was why the Earth's
expansive ’ forces didn't make it balloon or explode. On the
contrary: just as Newton's planets orbited in the heavens, so
continents orbited through Earth's interior.
On Hutton's Earth, everything was in balance. Everything
cycled; everything revolved. Hutton evoked a whole series of
regenerations, of erosion being repaired by consolidation and
uplift, as new lands were born from the wreckage of the old,
over and over, using his heat-fuelled processes of lithification
and uplift. And having no limit in time, a cycling, self­
renewing Earth was surely a more perfect design than a world
doomed to decay as soon as it was created.
Hutton never veered from his central argument. Earth was a
machine, he declared from the beginning, designed by a divine
mind for a particular purpose: 'The globe of this Earth is
evidently made for man. He alone, of all the beings which have
life upon this body, enjoys the whole and every part .f. and he
alone can make the knowledge of this system a source of
pleasure and the means of happiness.' To us it is a magnificent,
alien, hubristic vision: of Earth as a machine designed by God,
on which volcanoes are nothing but valves to get rid of excess
142 AGES IN CHAOS

heat - a machine designed to sustain 'life and specifically

mankind, like a huge space station.
But how old was the Earth? Hutton could not say how
many cycles might have preceded the present one. In Athe
relentless churning, all vestiges of the deepest past had been
erased, and the trajectories of the far future could not be
discerned. As Playfair would write, 'The author of nature ...
has not permitted in his works any symptom of infancy or of
old age, or any sign by which we may estimate either their
future or their past duration/ Hutton was not saying the
Earth was eternal (a point that was to be greatly misunder­
stood, as will be shown later). But if there was no trace in the
present condition of the Earth of its origin or end, there was
nothing he could say about those singularities: they were
beyond the scope of 'human observation'.
It was a stunning declaration. Suddenly the walls of Ussher's
box-universe had collapsed, to be replaced by a vast hall of
mirrors, in which there was nothing to be seen but geological
cycles, repeating over and over, each cycle enormously long -
and the whole sequence unimaginably longer still. As Hutton
thrillingly declared, 'The result, therefore, of our present
enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect
of an end.'

'We have now got to the end of our reasoning ... We have the
satisfaction to find, that in nature there is wisdom, system,
and consistency.'
Considering Hutton's presentation with the benefit of
hindsight, we can recognise startling insights - in the heat
origin of igneous rocks like basalt, in the 'rock cycle' (as
modern geologists call Hutton's cycles of erosion and uplift),
in Hutton's uniformitarianism, and in his intuition over the
scale of Earth's true age.
There are also errors and omissions, however. Hutton was
wrong to claim an igneous origin for flints, although ironically
their presence in continental rocks was one of the first geo­
logical puzzles to attract his attention. More fundamentally,
while Hutton rejected the old Biblical timescale for the creation
of the world, he was prepared to concede, wrongly, that human
history might match Ussher's narrow timescale: 'Now, if we
 CONSOLIDATION 143
are to take the written history of man for the rule by which we
should judge of the time when the species first began, that
period would be but little removed from the present state of
things. The Mosaic history places this beginning of man at no
great distance,- and there has not been found, in natural history,
any document by which a high antiquity might be attributed
to the human race [in Hutton's day no prehistoric human
fossils had been identified]. But this is not the case with regard
to the inferior species of animals, particularly those which
inhabit the ocean and its shores. We find in natural history
monuments which prove that those animals had long existed;
and we thus procure a measure for the computation of a period
of time extremely remote, though far from being precisely
ascertained.'
Hutton also believed that his previous ages were essentially
similar to the present, save only for the peculiar absence of
man; his study of the rocks had not demonstrated to him that
previous ages, populated by dinosaurs or even lifeless, might
be different to the present. It appears that Hutton's thinking
here was shaped by his background. He had learned his
geologising in Scotland, where 'the strata ... being much
broken and confused, it is seldom that any one bed can far be
traced'. There was nothing comparable to the reasonably
regular upward succession of fossil-bearing rocks to be found
in southern England, which would give the first geological
map-makers their clue in their mapping of geological ages with
their cargoes of evolving life.
Besides, Hutton's interest in the rocks had always been
mineralogical and chemical. He had never been much
concerned with any fossils he observed: 'Being neither botanist
nor zoologist in particular, I never considered the different
types of figured bodies found in a strata, further than to
distinguish betwixt animal and vegetable, sea & land objects.'
Indeed, his superficial study of the fossils he did observe
misled him: 'We have but to examine the strata of our Earth,
in which we find the remains of animals. In this examination,
we not only discover every genus of animal which at present
exists in the sea, but probably every species, and perhaps some
species with which at present we are not acquainted. There
are, indeed, varieties in those species, compared with the
144 AGES IN CHAOS

present animals which we examine, but no greater varieties

than may perhaps be found among the same species in the
different quarters of the globe. Therefore, the system of animal
life, which had been maintained in the ancient sea, had.jiot
been different from that which now subsists, and of which it
belongs to naturalists to know the history' (my emphasis). Of
course he was wrong; the animals of antique times were
different from the present.
Hutton missed the possibility, then, of recognising a pro­
gression of life in the fossils, as well as of using them as an
index to date strata; educated by Scotland's broken rocks, he
was always more struck by the great violence done to the land
than by its orderly construction.
Moreover, his insights are set in an uncertain matrix of ill-
formed physical theory. Here Hutton was a victim of his
times: physics and chemistry were simply not mature enough
to provide a proper context for his ideas, and his appeal to
divine design arguments would certainly not be scientifically
respectable today.
At bottom, however, his hypothesising was based on what
he had found out in the field, and the instincts he had
developed on his windswept farms,- and his intuitive grasp of
Earth's cyclic unity was profound and true. It was certainly a
pivotal moment in scientific history. Hutton had been the first
to set out a coherent and testable modern model of the Earth
to compete with the creaking Neptunist notions - and in the
process he had discovered deep time.

After the completion of the reading of the second part of his

paper, to the applause of his colleagues Hutton sat down. The
whole of his argument is an elegant interplay of three key
metaphors: the Earth as an orderly Newtonian system, as
orderly as the heavens,- the Earth as a machine, like Watt's
steam engines; and the Earth as a body with cycles of renewal,
like Harvey's circulating blood. At last all the threads of
Hutton's life had come together: the disciple of Newton and
Maclaurin, the doctor, the farmer, the visionary geologist. It
was the high point of his intellectual life: he must have felt
that he had achieved his ambition of becoming the Newton of
the Earth.
 CONSOLIDATION 145

But this was Edinburgh's Royal Society, not a gentlemen's

club. And Hutton's audience, in the lecture room and beyond,
would be harsher in its reception of his ideas than he could
have imagined.
 15
'The world was tired out with
geological theories'
On 4 July 1785, three months after Hutton's oral presentation,
a meeting was called to discuss his paper. Hutton was
evidently nervous, for he was again struck by illness. And well
he might have been: clubbability and charm would be no use
when the hard questioning started.
Every graduate student of science goes through a similar
process. The conclusion of my own doctorate (in engineering)
was a 'viva', an oral presentation of my work, with tough
scrutiny by experts from my own department and from another
university. Such sessions are gruelling, and, scientists being as
human as everybody else, there is always plenty of backbiting
and score-settling. But the purpose is to make the science
better, by driving out errors and misapprehensions. In a way,
modern science works by harnessing some of the less pleasant
aspects of human nature as a feedback mechanism to improve
the work itself.
James Hutton was not a professional academic, however. He
was fifty-nine years old, and the medical degree he had obtained
as a young man was now a distant memory. Not only that: he
also found - perhaps to his surprise - that much of his
audience, even in the Royal Society of Edinburgh he had just
helped set up, was indifferent, even hostile.

Hutton's presentation itself had not impressed. He was not a

lecturer. Though it did contain striking phrases - 'no vestige of
a beginning' - and though he admirably eschewed excessive
technical jargon, his paper was awkwardly written, and diffi­
cult to follow. Even his key supporter Playfair would say that
'the reasoning is sometimes embarrassed by the care taken to
render it strictly logical; and the transitions, from the author's
peculiar notions of arrangement, are often unexpected and
abrupt. These defects run more or less through all Dr Hutton's
 CONSOLIDATION 147
writings, and produce a degree of obscurity astonishing to
those who knew him, and who heard him every day converse
with no less clearness and precision, than animation and
force.' This was a major strike against Hutton in a time when
science was seen almost as a branch of literature - Playfair
called Hutton the 'author' of his theory - and the elegance
with which an argument was presented was a significant factor
in its authority.
Besides, though chemistry and mineralogy were frequently
discussed topics within the Society, geology was not. It may
have been difficult for the less geologically attuned in Hutton's
audience to grasp the points he was making about his specimens.
Playfair would say that Hutton's descriptions 'suppose in the
reader too great a knowledge of the things described'.
Even for those who understood his geology, Hutton's theory
was off-puttingly radical. His views on granite and basalt,
perhaps the best founded on his field observations, were
diametrically opposed to prevailing geological theories: by
placing granite among the youngest rocks on Earth's surface,
he completely reversed the time sequence of Werner and his
Neptunists. The big leap was difficult to accept. In addition,
nobody had really understood Hutton's careful epistemology
and his uniformitarianism, or his arguments about heat -
partly because he hadn't sufficiently explained them, in a
presentation Playfair called too brief.
Then there was the man himself. Popular he might have
been, but even his closest friends were prepared to admit that
Hutton had long been something of an oddity in Edinburgh's
fashionable circles: the farmer without a formal academic
position, with antiquated views on phlogiston and the like,
with his eccentricities of manner and dour clothes. Given the
grandiose nature of his theory, a certain snobbery may have
cut in among the assembled academics.
Then there was the evidence - or the lack of it. Hutton could
have called on results from geological experiments carried out
by Black, himself and others on what happened when you
melted and cooled rocks in the laboratory. But oddly, he
hadn't. By this time Hutton was discouraged about the value
of experimentation,- he would argue with Sir James Hall about
it. Surely no human experiment could yet match the pressures
148 AGES IN CHAOS

and temperatures that were possible in nature? Perhaps Hutton

feared that quoting an imperfect experiment might do his
theory more harm than good.
Even Playfair conceded this had been a mistake. Though
Hutton himself believed the evidence he showed for the action
of heat on the rocks was very strong, 'for my part/ wrote
Playfair, 'it is a conviction that would be strengthened by an
agreement with the results even of such experiments as it is
within our reach to make. It seems to me, that it is with this
principle in geology, much as it is with the parallax of the
Earth's orbit in astronomy,- the discovery of which, though not
necessary to prove the truth of the Copernican System, would
be a most pleasing and beautiful addition to the evidence by
which it is supported.' With insufficient evidence, Hutton
looked, despite all his epistemology, like nothing but another
old-fashioned geological theorist: even Playfair would say,
'The world was tired out with unsuccessful attempts to form
geological theories ...'
John Walker had listened with particular hostility to Hutton's
presentation. Walker, professor of natural history at the
University of Edinburgh from 1779 and nemesis of the Scottish
antiquarians, was now the secretary of the Society's Physical
section, to which Hutton presented his theory. Walker had
known Hutton since 1770, but, as Hutton surely knew, Walker
was an open opponent of geological theorising of any kind. He
was also an influential teacher whose students had included
Sir James Hall and Playfair - and a young man called Robert
Jameson, who would later give Hutton's theory and his legacy
a very tough time indeed.
Perhaps what hurt Hutton most of all, though, was the
indifference with which his presentation was received. Some
of his audience did get the point: 'His paper contains a variety
of ingenious observations and new facts established principally
from specimens in his own instructive geological collection,'
one would write. But as Playfair wrote, you might have
thought that 'a work of so much originality as this Theory of
the Earth ... would have produced a sudden and visible effect
... yet the truth is .... that several years elapsed before anyone
shewed himself publicly concerned about it, either as an
enemy or a friend.'
 CONSOLIDATION 149
And then there was also the question of God. There were
plenty of Presbyterians in the audience - both Walker and
Playfair were ministers of the Kirk - and any conventional
Christian would recognise that Hutton's 'no vestige, no
prospect' was a clear rejection of the Genesis narrative. What
made it worse was that Hutton's epistemology and his notions
of uniformly working natural processes clearly echoed the
writings of David Hume, the notorious God-denier. James
Hutton, it was said, had shown himself to be an atheist.
Of course, the charge was misdirected. Hutton's design­
argument theory was nothing if not a vision of how God
operates. Indeed, it seems that a key impulse for constructing
his theory was a search for a new faith after his life on the farm
had left 'nothing of the Christian about me'. Of the attacks he
would endure in the years to come, none would upset him
more.
His very first reaction after the Society session was to try to
respond to the religious questions. In that same month of July
he wrote out a new preface to his work, entitled 'Memorial
Justifying the Present Theory of the Earth from the Suspicion
of Impiety'. He tried to argue that religion and science should
not come into conflict because they held authority in different
spheres. The Book of Genesis was not a literal diary of Earth's
creation but a kind of celebration of God's power. In any event,
he insisted, he was not being impious: 'The Word of God,
whether revealed by the common faculties of man or given to
human understanding in a preternatural manner, must be
always one.'
He sent his draft to his old friend William Robertson, by
then the principal of Edinburgh University. Robertson
famously opposed religious bigotry, and his daughter Mary had
actually married a prominent Deist. Robertson smoothly
rewrote Hutton's preface, but he did wonder whether Hutton
should bother with a preface at all. After all, it wasn't what he
truly believed. Hutton and Robertson concluded that the
preface would do more harm than good, and Hutton» quietly
dropped it.
A pamphlet summarising Hutton's thesis was produced
shortly after his talk. It spanned twenty-eight pages and was
entitled 'Abstract of a Dissertation Read in the Royal Society
150 AGES IN CHAOS

of Edinburgh, Upon the Seventh of March, and Fourth of April,

1785, Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and
Stability'. It is the first known publication of Hutton's theory.
Few copies of the pamphlet were produced, and fewer still
survive; it was seen as ephemeral, and copies would have been
destroyed when the full version of Hutton's paper eventually
appeared in the Transactions. Two copies came on the market
when Sir James Hall's library was sold off in 1947. They went
for £90 and £110 - still in their original blue paper wrappers,
and signed 'From the Author Dr Hutton'.
The Abstract was circulated in Britain and on the
Continent. In France it was read by Desmarest, for instance.
Hutton received an enthusiastic response from one Matthew
Guthrie, a founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and
Physician to the Imperial Cadet Corps in St Petersburg, who
replied, 'I am much flattered by your attention in sending me
a copy of your little publication. I am only sorry that I cannot
satisfy a desire it naturally creates, that of seeing your
dissertation at large ... Your mode of investigation and choice
of proofs from natural phenomena which stare every man in
the face, and from matter that chemistry can demonstrate the
changes it has undergone, certainly appears to me as the most
probable manner of coming at truth ... I wish you therefore
much success and much honour which will naturally result
from it.'
Hutton knew, however, that the Abstract wasn't extensive
enough to provoke a wide response, positive or negative. For
that he would have to wait until the formal publication of his
work in the Society's Transactions, which was some years
away. What was he to do in the mean time? He would get
nowhere by picking away at the religious aspects. He had also
been stung by the accusations that he hadn't produced enough
evidence to back up his assertions.
It was time to consult God's books once more. To his credit
- at the age of fifty-nine - Hutton went back out on the road,
once again risking weary feet and saddle sores, to gather more
data.

His first concern was granite.

A key premise of his theory was that granite was not a
 CONSOLIDATION 151
'primitive7 rock, the first to be laid down, as the Neptunists
believed. To Hutton granite was a young rock, intruded in a
molten state into older formations. The reason granite was
predominant among Alpine peaks, for example, was because it
was durable, not because it was ancient.
Only one of these granitic theories could be true. 'Dr Hutton',
wrote Playfair, 'was anxious that an instantia crucis might
subject his theory to the severest test.' This language shows
Hutton was following classical scientific method. An instantia
crucis - a 'crucial instance', a term defined by Francis Bacon -
means a specimen or test which distinguishes unambiguously
between two competing ideas. And now Hutton wanted to find
a crucial instance regarding the nature of granite.
His mind turned to the Scottish Highlands. He knew that
there was granite at the source of the River Dee, and schist at
the source of the Tay (schists are stratified rocks of various
kinds, with a high content of mica or hornblende). So the
countryside between the two rivers looked promising for a
junction between the two types of rock. John Clerk of Eldin, in
fact, had already seen granite veins in the River Garry. What
Hutton hoped to find were examples of granite pushing
through sedimentary rock, which would prove the granite was
younger than the sedimentary, and that it must have flowed in
a molten form.
So in September 1785 - just a few months after the
unsatisfactory presentation to the Royal Society - Hutton and
Clerk set off to stay with the fourth Duke of Atholl, whose
deer forest, close to the Duke's seat of Blair Castle, contained
the sites of interest.
This noble family had been split during the rise of 1745. The
incumbent Duke had supported the government, but his
brothers favoured Prince Charles. The Duke eventually fled,
and the Jacobite youngest brother laid siege to the castle. (Blair
would be the last castle ever besieged in mainland Britain.)
The successful Jacobite brother took the estate and went on to
father the third Duke, who in turn fathered the fourth - so the
young man who welcomed Hutton and Clerk on their
geologising trip was the grandson of the Lieutenant-General of
Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Hutton and Clerk made their first base in the Forest Lodge,
152 AGES IN CHAOS

about ten kilometres up the valley of the Garry. It is a beauti­

ful area: Burns would stay there two years later, as would
Wordsworth and his sister in 1803. Clerk and Hutton had
arrived at Blair in the shooting season, and the expedition,
Hutton recorded, 'made an agreeable party of pleasure of a
thing which otherwise would have been incommodious and
painful'.
In the company of the Duke, Hutton and Clerk travelled
along Glen Tilt, a tributary of the Garry. The Glen is a long,
narrow valley where the river has exposed the underlying
structure of the rock. They had some trouble: they had to
climb a narrow rivulet, a route which was 'fit for no other than
the footsteps of a goat'. Clerk made drawings of the area for his
friend, and Hutton would later make a beautiful watercolour
map (which is now in a US Geological Survey collection).
Perhaps, as they climbed, they talked about the great affairs
of the world.
In recent years John Clerk of Eldin - once a medical student,
mine operator and etcher - had been developing yet another
new career. He had been intrigued by accounts of an abortive
naval battle between England and France in 1778, during the
American War of Independence. The debacle had led to the
British commander-in-chief, Admiral Keppel, being court-
martialled for misconduct and neglect of duty. During 1779
the case, which lasted five weeks, was discussed with great
interest. Keppel was eventually acquitted - but no naval battle
had ever been documented so thoroughly.
As he read these reports, Clerk began to muse on principles
of naval warfare, so vital to the ongoing war with France.
Battleships of the time fired their guns in broadsides, so
opposing fleets would be drawn up in lines of battle, sailing
past each other on parallel courses. Clerk wondered if it might
be more effective to try to break the enemy's line, which
would throw his ships into confusion. He would demonstrate
his ideas with little cork models on Edinburgh dinner tables.
The young Walter Scott would pocket some of the models,
with Clerk complaining good-humouredly that his demonstra­
tion had been ruined. Perhaps predictably, Clerk faced great
frustration trying to get anyone in authority to listen to him.
But his ideas had been applied at last in a great victory over the
 CONSOLIDATION 153
French fleet in the Windward Isles, to much celebration in the
Edinburgh circle.
At Glen Tilt, Hutton and Clerk found exactly what they
were looking for: 'granite breaking and displacing the strata in
every conceivable manner' - proof that the granite was indeed
younger than the strata into which it had intruded. Hutton
was so noisily delighted that 'the guides who accompanied
him were convinced that it must be nothing less than the
discovery of a vein of silver or gold, that could call forth such
strong marks of joy and exultation'.
But the trip wasn't done yet. Braving discomfort - 'in
matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but
new desires' - the friends abandoned the Lodge and penetrated
further into the wilderness of the Highlands, until they
reached a still more remote hunting seat at Fealar, 'the most
removed, I believe,' Hutton would write, 'of any in Britain
from the habitations of men'.
While the Duke went shooting - he bagged three harts and a
hind, 'all in excellent condition' - Hutton and Clerk walked up
the valley of the Tarf, a tributary of the Tilt. They found more
treasures in tumbled fragments of schist with granite
intrusions. In one sample they found a vein of granite that
pushed through an older mass of granite as well as broken
schistus. Here was proof of a whole series of geological events:
the sediment had been laid down, the first bit of granite had
intruded, and then after that another vein of granite had pushed
through the composite mass.
From Glen Tilt Hutton brought home a boulder of granite,
intending to show its igneous origin. The difficulty of trans­
porting such a monster across hundreds of kilometres by
sailing ships and horses is a measure of the importance of
Hutton's samples to him. When Hutton wrote up this
excursion he would conclude his Glen Tilt observations by
comparing the geology of the Lowlands and Highlands, and
remark, with underlined emphasis, 'That whatever be the
materials in those two cases, Nature acts upon the same
principle in her operations, in consolidating bodies by means
of heat and fusion, and by moving great masses of fluid
matter in the bowels of the Earth.'
154 AGES IN CHAOS

The following September, Hutton and Clerk set off again,

hoping to investigate granite and other formations on the
western island of Arran, but the weather was too poor for them
to make the crossing. They explored the Clyde coast instead,
travelling from Glasgow through the shires of Ayr and
Galloway. They found basalt dykes and granite exposures, and
Hutton observed that the Rinns of Galloway, now a peninsula,
had once been an island - proof that the sea level had been
higher in the past. In Galloway, granite had become prized as
a building stone, and Hutton quizzed the locals who had become
expert on its nature. They also visited a lead mine in which
Clerk had an interest, and consulted its overseer for local
geological information.
Hutton, now sixty, remained vigorous. One day, near
Sandyhills Bay on the Solway, the geologists had been walking
beside their chaise along a road. But when the road turned
inland they gave up the chaise and scrambled along the sandy
bay to a rocky portion of the shore. Here the strata in the
schist rock were tilted almost upright, but granite broke
through the sandy beach. They looked for the junction between
the granite and the schist, but it was covered in bushes and
briars, through which the two elderly explorers had to push
their way. At last they found a neat granite vein intruding
into the schist, just as they would have hoped, dwindling to a
thread where it could penetrate no further.
Another day, the geologists struggled to make out forma­
tions on the south side of the Cairnsmore mountain. Hutton
ruefully remarked, 'To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the
humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting
as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the
mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of
rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which
obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different
species of stone, is no less a serious subject of regret.'
By the end of this trip, and with the evidence from Glen Tilt,
Hutton would write, 'We may now conclude, that, without
seeing granite actually in a fluid state, we have every demon­
stration possible of this fact; that is to say, of granite having
been forced to flow, in a state of fusion, among strata broken
by a subterraneous force, and distorted in every manner and
 CONSOLIDATION 155
degree.' Back home he would still have to make this case - but
Hutton, in this Indian summer of his geologising, seemed to
have been rejuvenated.

As Hutton sought out his crucial instances, the debate that

was shaping the future of geology continued.
In 1787, the arch-Neptunist Werner published a little book
entitled Short Classification and Description of the Rocks.
The 'Kurze Klassifikation', as it came to be known, was an
important work in that it sent out a new and functional
vocabulary and definition system that would help enormously
in the classification of rocks in the years ahead.
But Werner also used it to reassert unequivocally his view
that basalt has an aqueous origin. By now this claim was con­
troversial even outside Hutton's circle, because field workers
exploring the extinct volcanoes in Auvergne, France, had
gradually reached the conclusion that basalt was much more
likely to be igneous. Nonetheless, these weighty pronounce­
ments from the leading figure in the field, utterly contradictory
to Hutton's own ideas, must have deepened Hutton's unease.
Meanwhile, Edinburgh life continued. Robert Burns visited
the city from 1786 to 1788: while there, he would write one of
his most famous love poems, addressed to the niece of Colin
Maclaurin. In 1787 the publisher William Creech threw a
party to celebrate his Edinburgh edition of Burns's poems. It
was at this party that Burns, aged twenty-eight, met Walter
Scott, then sixteen, for the only time. Hutton and Black were
both there - as was a glamorous aeronaut called Vicenzo
Lunardi.
French balloonists had been performing spectacular aerial
stunts since 1783. There had been a few flights in Scotland
before, but Lunardi, secretary to the Neapolitan embassy in
London, was a sensation. He made a spectacular take-off from
the grounds of Heriot's Hospital in Edinburgh, and the sight of
the immense object drifting in the sky, with handsome
Lunardi in his Neapolitan army officer's uniform beneath it,
caused consternation and excitement. Lunardi was rewarded
with fame: he was wined and dined by Edinburgh society, and
given honorary membership of the Beggar's Benison.
156 AGES IN CHAOS

In August 1787, Hutton tried to reach Arran once again.

Hutton and Clerk had engaged a Dr Irvine to be their
'conductor in taking a vessel down the Clyde and visiting
several places by the way', but he had unfortunately died in
the spring. In August the weather was very poor, and Clerk of
Eldin didn't want to undertake the journey. Hutton considered
travelling alone, but to his pleasure Clerk's son, another John
Clerk, offered to accompany him. The younger Clerk had a
contracted leg, which made him limp, but he gamely pursued
Hutton as they climbed Goat Fell, the highest mountain on
the island - just to see a few basalt dykes, 'an idea which could
not have entered the head of any sober person who was not a
mineralist'. This time it would be the younger Clerk's job to
make the geological drawings, which he did, expertly.
The younger Clerk, then thirty, would be called to the Bar in
1785. He found fame as an advocate in the notorious trial of
Duncan Brodie. A member of the Town Council by day and a
burglar by night, Brodie's double life would inspire Robert
Louis Stevenson to write Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Clerk was no
teetotaller. Once, plastered early in the morning, he stopped a
servant-girl in the street and asked where John Clerk's house
was. 'Why, you're John Clerk,' she said. 'Yes, but it's his house
I want.' Throughout his life he would retain his strong Scots
accent. One day, addressing the House of Lords, Clerk argued
that 'the waiter had rin that way for forty years'. The Lord
Chancellor sarcastically asked if the Scots spelled water with
two t's. 'No, my Lord,' said Clerk. 'We dinna spell waiter wi'
twa t's, but we spell manners with two n's.' No doubt Clerk
was a fine companion for Hutton on this summer jaunt.
Hutton would write of the purpose of this Arran expedition,
'It may now be observed, that the present history with regard
to the island of Arran, is not proposed as necessary in that
question concerning primitive mountains, nor as adding any
new light to the nature of granite, as already investigated; but
as an example in Cosmogony, where it may be proper to see
the connection of various things, or the several parts which
enter the constitution of the globe.' That is, by this time he
was confident enough to proceed from particular bits of evidence
to generalities, and to see 'how far the natural history of Arran
shall be proper to try the Theory of the Earth which had been
 CONSOLIDATION 157
formed from that of other parts'. This small Scottish island
was to serve as a scale model of a planet.
Again Hutton investigated junctions between granites and
schists. Once they had caught the scent of a contact, the two
men followed their motionless quarry 'with more animation
than could have been expected from such an innocent chase'.
Hutton was startled by the number and complexity of the
dykes of basalt he found, and in one place he found dykes made
of black glass, which pleased him greatly, for they were
overwhelming evidence of an igneous origin for the basalt.
The island, crammed with geological phenomena, proved so
interesting to Hutton that he planned to reconstruct its
geological history, but unfortunately this was a project he
never carried out.

Hutton still needed to find clinching proof of his suggestion

that the land was shaped by his cycles of erosion, consolida­
tion, uplift. A 'crucial instance' in this case would be a place
where the remnants of strata from one previous cycle had been
lifted, broken, eroded, and then overlaid by strata from the
next cycle: an 'unconformity', in modern geologists' terms.
He had actually seen one such example at Lochranza in
Arran. Having set out on horseback to explore the feature, he
found that the River Sanox ran along the junction between the
schist and the granite of the mountains. So he abandoned his
horse and scrambled over the moss and the moor to the head
of the river. He found his unconformity, but it wasn't as
convincing an example as he would have liked - Playfair wrote
that 'the contact... is so covered by the soil, as to be visible in
very few places'. Nonetheless, Hutton's discovery is now
lauded by historians of geology, for it was the very first
unconformity of its type to be recognised in Britain.
On his return from Arran in 1787, Hutton happened to visit
a friend in Jedburgh, in the border country of south-east
Scotland. And there he found, purely by chance, a remarkably
clear example of what he sought. *
Jedburgh was a quiet, beautiful place. Its abbey, founded in
the twelfth century, repeatedly found itself in the way of
marauding English armies,- it was burned three times in the
fifteenth century alone, and again by Henry VIII's armies in
158 AGES IN CHAOS

1544. The Union of Scotland and England brought Jedburgh

relief from the armies, but little economic benefit, even by
1787 - the town was a poor place. But history runs deep: today,
in the roofless ruins of the abbey, you can see Roman altar A
stones, cut up and reused by medieval masons.
During his visit, Hutton took a walk south along the bank of
the River Jed. The valley is narrow but deep, its walls mostly
clad in green. In one place, however, erosion had exposed the
underlying rock. And Hutton was startled to see, as clear as
day, an unconformity of just the type he had been seeking.
You can visit the exposure today. It is known as 'Hutton's
unconformity', and even the local tourist office knows about
it - though its literature sites it in the wrong place. The
exposure is on private land, and you have to phone ahead to
the owner, a kindly gentleman called Mr Veitch. There is a
path, mostly overgrown, leading down from the verge of the
A68, the main road to Newcastle and Edinburgh. It's some­
thing of a scramble: Mr Veitch told me that erosion regularly
makes it impassable.
The bedrock here is sandstone and marl pierced by veins of
basalt. You can see fragments of these veins sticking up out of
the river itself, a feature Mr Veitch, in his childhood, learned
to call 'clints'. The exposure itself is small, a purple-red gash
in the river bank foliage only a few metres high and several
paces long. But in this green-framed window you can see two
types of strata. Playfair describes how 'the schistus there is
micaceous, of vertical plates, running from east to west,
though somewhat undulated. Over these is extended a body of
red sandstone, in beds nearly horizontal, having interposed
between it and the vertical strata a breccia full of fragments of
these last.' The strata of underlying greywacke, a Silurian-age
conglomerate of quartz and slate, are tilted vertically. These
strata are very fine and sharp, some no more than paper-thin.
But overlying the vertical striping of the greywacke, the
horizontal bands of red sandstone are easy to see.
This contact of vertical with horizontal is the key to Hutton's
reading of the feature. The two sets of strata, horizontal and
vertical, must have been laid down at different times and in
different conditions; the rocks can only be interpreted as the
ruin of one cycle laid down unconformably over another.
 CONSOLIDATION 159
John Clerk made a charming copper-plate of the unconfor­
mity. The picture [reproduced on the jacket of this book) shows
a phaeton and horseman meeting on flat and unremarkable dry
land that lies over what had been marine strata, violently
distorted. My own photos, taken in 2002, show a similar
cross-section, with modern four-wheel-drives running along
the A68 above the same strata. Hutton's unconformity is a
small feature, unnoticed by the traffic that thunders above, but
if you can read the rocks, it tells a dramatic story.
Mr Veitch gets few visitors. The town council has a plan to
make the path properly and even build a viewing platform. But
Mr Veitch says the same plans have been under discussion as
long as he has lived there, which is fifty-five years - a quarter
of the way back to Hutton himself. In the mean time he has to
call in the fire brigade regularly to hose away the vegetation
which forever threatens to overwhelm the unconformity.
Still, Jedburgh is proud of its bit of geological history. On
plaques around the town you will see Hutton's portrait
displayed as one of four 'Famous Folk Linked to Jedburgh' -
along with one of the few prominent female scientists of the
nineteenth century, the author of 'Rule Britannia', and the
inventor of the kaleidoscope.

After the serendipity of Jedburgh, Hutton now deliberately

sought more examples of well-exposed unconformities.
He knew that the boundary between the resistant greywackes
of the Southern Uplands and the softer sandstone of the low
country ran through the Dunglass estate, some sixty-five
kilometres east of Edinburgh, home of his old friends the Hall
family. At Hutton's request, Sir James Hall had his uncle
search for the contact between greywackes and sandstone in a
burn called the Tour. Then, in June 1788, Hutton and Playfair
joined Hall at Dunglass.
Playfair, Hall and Hutton took a boat and set off to explore
the coast. The weather was calm enough for them to be able
to steer close to the foot of the rocks. They followed the
sandstone as it rose towards the schist.
At last they came to the headland called Siccar Point. Here
the junction between the rock types had been washed bare of
vegetation by the sea. When they landed they could see clearly
16o AGES IN CHAOS

how, just as at Jedburgh, the older strata had been tilted on end
and eroded before younger sediments, made up of debris from
the older, had been laid flat on top. Playfair's record of his
response to this, in his biography of Hutton, remains a clas§ic
of science writing:

What clearer evidence could we have had of the different

formation of these rocks, and of the long interval which
separated their formation, had we actually seen them
emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves
necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on
which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and
when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be
deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of
a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote
presented itself, when even the most ancient of these
rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in
horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet
disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst
asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still
more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary
perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so
far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with
earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was
now unfolding to us the order and series of these
wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther
reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture
to follow.

Hutton had at last taught himself to read God's books, and the
stories he could tell were wonderful indeed.
Hutton and Playfair walked back along the burn, looking for
more junctions between the strata. They failed to find any,
although they did see basaltic boulders from a large dyke that
cut through the burn. Later in the day the rain came down,
washing out a further expedition they had planned. Still, it had
been a good day. They had 'collected, in one day,' noted
Playfair, 'more ample materials for future speculation, than
have sometimes resulted from years of diligent and laborious
research'.
 CONSOLIDATION l6l
Playfair's judgement was surely right. Hutton has been retro­
spectively criticised for publishing his theory before assembling
crucial evidence such as the clinching granite samples, and he
hadn't seen a single unconformity when he stood before the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785: any modern research
student would be criticised for such lapses. But even before
1785, Hutton had clearly understood the rocks on which his
theory was founded. On his return to the field, he knew
exactly what he was looking for and how to find it, and the
careful, intelligent, directed forays of these later years bore
ample fruit. To my mind, there is no doubt he was a good
scientist, a good geologist.

Hutton made more trips that summer, including a visit to the

Isle of Man with the Duke of Atholl. The Duke, who owned
the island, had asked Hutton and Black to make a miner­
alogical survey of the island. Though he enjoyed the Duke's
hospitality, Hutton found nothing there that modified his
theories. On the way back home, he visited the Lake District.
In a quarry near Windermere he found a piece of limestone
with fossil impressions in it - neat proof that another
supposedly 'primitive' rock was no such thing.
But these weren't major or purposeful expeditions. On that
memorable day at Siccar Point, none of the companions could
have known that this was the last significant geological
exploration James Hutton would make.
 i6
‘A wild and unnatural notion"

At last, in 1788, three years after his oral presentation, Hutton's

paper appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Sociey of
Edinburgh (although preprints may have been circulating for a
year or so before that). I studied the paper in the library of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, in the Society's bound set of its
Transactions. The paper has survived the centuries well, and
the somewhat archaic typeface is readable, but the plates,
drawings of some of Hutton's hand samples, have stained the
facing pages.
The phoney war was over. With proper publication, Hutton's
ideas were finally exposed to a national and international
audience. He waited nervously for the reviews to appear.
The reaction was mixed, and disappointing.

The Analytical Review dismissed the theory in a paragraph as

just another 'philosophical romance'. The Critical Review
gave Hutton four pages. Though the reviewers wouldn't quite
back his theory, the empirical evidence was discussed, and the
majesty of his thinking praised: 'the mind cannot comprehend
so vast a system'.
The Monthly Review, though, doubted that subterranean
fire consolidated the rocks, and was shocked by what they saw
as Hutton's notion of 'a regular succession of Earths from all
eternity!' Hutton, of course, had not claimed an eternal age for
the Earth, just that the beginning of the Earth, like its end, was
beyond the scope of human investigation - a subtle difference,
but crucial from a theological point of view, and endlessly
misunderstood.
Hutton got some support from his old friend Erasmus Darwin,
who used Hutton's theory to inform his Botanic Gardens, a
poem on botany and geology. Hutton and Darwin disagreed
about geology, but Darwin's poetry was extremely popular, and
his work won Hutton some welcome publicity.
 CONSOLIDATION 163
The first major riposte to Hutton's theory was much more
hostile. It was a forty-page attack made in 1789 by John Williams
in his book The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom.
Williams assailed all Hutton's major points, but focused his
fire once again on his supposed claim of an eternal world. This
was a 'wild and unnatural notion' that led to 'scepticism, and
at last to downright infidelity and atheism'.
If Hutton was uneasy about the reception of his theory, then
he was more confident about his results on granite. In 1790,
therefore, he decided to present the results of his explorations
of Glen Tilt, Galloway and Arran to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, and show the specimens he had brought back. He
was shaken by the response even to this. Hutton hadn't done
enough, his Neptunist opponents said, either in his specimens
or in his accounts of his field trips, to establish his case that
granite was young and heat-moulded, rather than ancient and
water-deposited.
In 1791, Werner weighed in again from his Saxony fortress.
This time he published a theory of mineral veins. Such veins
had nothing to do with heat, as Hutton claimed; according to
Werner they were all aqueous in origin - even basalt - and they
had all been injected into the strata from above, seeping down
from oceans into cracks in the rock.
Hutton also came under attack in 1790-91 from Jean
André Deluc in The Monthly Review. Deluc, a weighty
figure, was Swiss-born but resident in Britain. His greatest
legacy would be his work on meteorology, a subject over
which he and Hutton had already fallen out. In 178'8 Hutton
had published a 'theory of rain', based on the effects of heat
on humidity, drawn from decades of observations of the
weather. Deluc's attack on this was vigorous, and 'the
controversy was carried on with more sharpness, on both
sides, than a theory in meteorology might have been
expected to call forth', as Playfair dryly noted. As a
geologist, Deluc was an old-fashioned thinker,- his keenest
interest was in reconciling the rocks with the Genesis story.
Now, over seventy pages, he laid into Hutton. He refuted
Hutton's evidence of erosion and consolidation, and vowed
to oppose his dismissal of miracles and other supernatural
causes. It was the most formidable charge of atheism yet
164 AGES IN CHAOS

brought against Hutton. Playfair believed that Hutton

drafted a reply to DeluC which the editor of the Review
refused to insert, but Playfair hesitated to bring a 'positive
charge of partiality against men who exercise a professioruin
which impartiality is the first requisite'.
There were aspects of these various reactions that Hutton
probably welcomed. He was not subject to personal attack, and
at least he was taken seriously, as the number of long and
weighty reviews must have told him. Even so, the reaction to
his theory remained scattered and muted, and the continuing
attacks over his supposed atheism were troubling. And by
now, time, though limitless for the Earth, was running out for
Hutton's circle.

Adam Smith had enjoined his friends that they should

destroy his lecture notes after his death, but permitted them
to use the rest of his manuscripts as they pleased. 'When
now [Smith] had become weak,' Hutton wrote in the
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 'and saw
the approaching end of his life, he spoke to his friends again
upon the same subject. They entreated him to make his
mind easy, as he might depend upon their fulfilling his desire.
He was then satisfied. However, some days afterwards,
finding his anxiety not entirely removed, he begged one of
them to destroy the volumes immediately. This accordingly
was done,- and his mind was so much relieved, that he was
able to receive his friends in the evening [of one Sunday in
1790 at Smith's last home, Panmure House] with his usual
complacency.'
Smith's friends had, Hutton continued, 'been in use to sup
with him every Sunday; and that evening there was a pretty
numerous meeting of them. Mr Smith not finding himself able
to sit up with them as usual, retired to bed before supper,- and,
as he went away, took leave of his friends by saying, "I believe
we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." He died a
very few days afterwards.' Smith was buried in the Canongate,
Hutton and Black serving as his executors.
And then - in 1791, aged sixty-six - Hutton himself fell ill.
Until this point in his life he had been lucky enough to enjoy
good health. But now, as Playfair reported, 'The disorder that
 CONSOLIDATION 165
threatened him (retention of urine), was one of those that most
immediately threaten life, and he was preserved only by
submitting to a dangerous, and painful operation.' The opera­
tion was performed by Black and his colleagues - without
anaesthetic. Hutton was left weakened and stranded in his room.
He would thereafter suffer from his ailment periodically; at
times he was bedridden.
Because of the sparseness of Playfair's account, we cannot be
sure what it was that afflicted Hutton. Given his age, it was
most likely a prostate problem. If it had been cancer he would
probably have been killed more quickly, but benign prostatic
hypertrophy would have caused these symptoms and could
well have recurred. Hutton's earlier life might have made
venereal disease a possibility; a urethral stricture would have
been a very painful cause of the retention of urine, but this
would probably have affected him at an earlier age. In any
event, it was probably the brutality of the surgical procedures
in Hutton's day, and the poor quality of the aftercare (by
modern standards) he would have received, that caused his
subsequent deterioration.
For now, though, 'the goodness of his constitution, aided, no
doubt, by the vigour and elasticity of his mind, restored him to
a considerable measure of health, and rendered his recovery
more complete than could have been expected'. Hutton would
continue to write, read, receive samples from his friends, and
welcome visitors. But it was the end of his geologising in the
field. There would be no more hill-climbing, or deer-hunting
dukes, or scrambles along rocky shores in search of intrusions
and unconformities. The Earth had no more to show James
Hutton.

By now, most European geologists were divided into two

camps, neither of which had been influenced much by
Hutton's theories.
The 'Vulcanists', including Desmarest and Faujas, were fire
geologists, who believed that volcanoes must have had
significant effects on the evolution of the Earth. The other
school was the Neptunists, who thought volcanoes were
irrelevant special effects. To them water was the key agent. All
Neptunists hypothesised some kind of universal ocean, out of
i66 AGES IN CHAOS

which the rocks had been deposited. But there was still a
whole spectrum of theologically inclined thinkers, ranging
from those who still held to the most literal interpretation of
the Bible account, to others who interpreted its teaching in a
more symbolic or allegorical way.
Of these various factions, Hutton had pretty much offended
everybody. As a uniformitarian who relied on the working of
present-day forces to shape the world, he made an enemy of
anybody who believed in past catastrophes of some kind, such
as the Neptunists. Not only that, he was advocating an age for
the Earth that had to be much older than even the most
generous estimates of the non-fundamentalist thinkers, like
Werner himself.
Then there was the little matter of the Earth's internal heat.
Hutton's thinking on subterranean heat earned him the label
'Plutonist'. But his position on this annoyed even the
Vulcanists. There were problems if Hutton's theory was based
on the then conventional ideas of caloric, the heat 'fluid'. Heat
causes expansion, which was effected by caloric particles
repelling each other. As long as you kept adding caloric, the
expansion would continue, but if you stopped adding caloric,
attractive forces would impose a contraction. So Hutton's heat
engine would have to have a source that kept adding caloric for
ever - which would surely cause an indefinite expansion of the
Earth, which was absurd.
Another problem was the source of Hutton's heat. None of
the standard theories of the day seemed to offer any help.
Could there be a central fire burning endlessly within the
Earth? Perhaps, but where had all the phlogiston (or, if you
followed Lavoisier, the oxygen) come from, to fuel such a
blaze?
All this was based on a misunderstanding, as Hutton's own
heat theory wasn't based on caloric - but then, he still hadn't
said, even now, what it was based on. And he had made no
claims about the source of the heat. The heat was just there,
circulating without end, consolidating sediments and uplifting
continents. This was unsatisfying for his supporters, and an
open goal for his opponents.
Amid all this controversy, and largely confined to his home,
Hutton continued to receive friends, to think, to read -
 CONSOLIDATION 167
and to write. Hutton had always written prolifically: he used
writing as much to clarify his own thoughts as to
communicate his ideas to others. Now, even as his strength
failed, he was trying to publish the results of a lifetime's
contemplation.
Hutton's habit was to dictate his work. His secretary of this
period had a graceful, flowing and very legible hand. Perhaps
his patient amanuensis was his last surviving sister, Isabella.
The women in Hutton's adult life, like the 'incendiary' Madam
Young, are shadowy figures. Not so the mother who had raised
him and ensured his education after the early death of his
father, the sisters with whom he had lived most of his life, and
especially Isabella, who now nursed him. But Isabella herself
grew ill as the decade wore on.
Hutton's first book, published in 1792, was called
Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy.
Here he reprinted his paper on rain, with an appendix that
reprised his bitter argument with Deluc. The rest of the book
concerned his phlogiston theories, to which he was still much
attached. He described how phlogistic matter would affect
measurable properties of matter like hardness and ductility,
and how phlogiston would affect light and colour. The book
was touchingly dedicated to Black, acknowledging science's
debt for 'your philosophical discoveries'.
No sooner were the Dissertations complete than Hutton
began work on a mighty new project. This would be
published in 1794 in three volumes, under the title of An
Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the
Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy.
In this vast and baffling work, Hutton developed the
epistemology he had built on Hume's philosophy: 'Body is
not what it is conceived by us to be, a thing necessarily
possessing volume, figure and impenetrability, but merely
an assemblage of powers, that by their action produce in us
the ideas of these external qualities ...' He set out his belief
that what we perceive doesn't necessarily match anything
that actually exists 'out there'. What we see is 'the creation
of the mind itself, but of the mind acted on from without,
and receiving information from some external power'.
Playfair, characteristically, would put this rather better:
i68 AGES IN CHAOS

'External things are no more'like the perceptions they give

rise to, than wine is similar to intoxication, or opium to the
delirium which it produces/
It is an eerie idea, as if we live in a vast virtual-reakty
system, with sensations artificially injected into our minds.
But Hutton went to great lengths to deduce the precepts of
religions from this theory: because the universe as recon­
structed by our minds is consistent and enduring, it is as real
to us as if it were external reality, and so we have just as much
an obligation to act morally.
Hutton's friends couldn't understand why he was spend­
ing his time on this turgid tome. They knew that he had
always intended to expand his 1788 paper on the theory
of the Earth into a longer book. He had been writing up his
findings from his field trips and readings in a series of
essays and papers, some presented to the Royal Society
of Edinburgh, but he continued to put off the labour of
completing the long geological work, and as his health
remained fragile his friends began to fear that it might never
appear in his lifetime - and that his theory would be left
undefended.
Hutton knew what he was doing, however. His ragged
epistemology was the context that contained the jewel of his
geological methodology, his uniformitarianism.
Essential or not, Hutton's huge work was almost
universally ignored by learned society, then and since. Even
his closest friend, Black, wouldn't buy a word of it. Adam
Ferguson joked that 'unreal as corporeal subjects were in his
apprehension, he established a lucrative manufacture, on
principles of chemistry.'
In 1793, Hutton's illness took a turn for the worse, leaving
him further weakened. During his slow convalescence, he began
to work through the proofs of his Principles of Knowledge.
And it was at this moment - with Hutton in his late sixties,
frail and often bedridden, his theory barely making a ripple in
the ocean of understanding - that he was subjected to the most
withering attack of all.
Richard Kirwan, Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, was a
chemist, mineralogist, meteorologist and geologist. He was
well known to Hutton through his defence of phlogiston. An
 CONSOLIDATION 169
eccentric recluse, he had a formidable mind, a deep faith, a
profound sense of righteousness - and many chips on his
shoulder. When he read Hutton's theory he was outraged.
 17
A
‘An abyss from which human
reason recoils'
Kirwan was the second son of four. Seven years younger than
Hutton, he was born in Cloughballymore, in County Galway,
Ireland. The Kirwans were a Catholic family who had settled
in Galway in the reign of Henry VI, although some accounts
gave them deeper roots.
It was a difficult time for Ireland - and especially for
Catholics. After the restoration of the monarchy following the
death of Cromwell, Ireland became a land of great Protestant
estates and small towns decaying under British trade
restrictions. Brave priests had to celebrate their Masses among
the ruins of churches and monasteries. At such a time, Kirwan
was lucky to be born into relative privilege.
Luke Hutton, Kirwan lost his father at a young age. He was
sent to live with his grandfather (who had once fought in the
army of James II), and was tutored by a Dominican friar,
beginning his fascination with theology. Catholics at this time
were excluded from universities in Ireland - and, indeed, in
Britain - so in 1750, Kirwan was sent to university in Poitiers,
in France. He resisted learning French until one of his tutors
discovered him reading chemistry books. The books were
confiscated and replaced with texts in French, whereupon his
grasp of the language improved dramatically.
By 1754, aged twenty-one, Kirwan had entered a Jesuit
novitiate at Saint-Omer in France. The following year,
however, his life took the first of many peculiar twists. His
elder brother, the heir to the family estate, was killed in a duel.
As the oldest surviving male, Kirwan was forced to give up his
studies, and was called home to run the estate.
Back home, he determined to study law, but his Catholic
origins were once again an obstacle for him. He had to fore­
swear his religion and adopt the faith of the Protestant
Ascendancy. He accepted this, but the sense that he had been
 CONSOLIDATION 171
forced to adopt a foreign faith must have galled him.
In 1757, he married a local girl: Anne, daughter of Sir
Thomas Blake of Menlo, in County Galway. But now he was
struck by another bizarre misfortune. Kirwan did not know
that Anne had run up debts that vastly exceeded her dowry. On
their marriage, Kirwan became immediately responsible for
his new wife's finances, and he was hauled away to gaol, where
he had to remain until the debts were paid. Still, he stuck by
Anne. They had two daughters together before she died in
1765, after just eight years of marriage.
Kirwan was eventually called to the Irish Bar in 1766, aged
thirty-three. Owing to the ample means with which his family
background provided him, however, he practised the law for
only two years beore giving it up for his science. He built up a
large library of chemistry books and, in a self-constructed
laboratory, began to run careful and laborious experiments. He
became fascinated by mineralogy. He carried out experiments
on the properties of carbon in coal, and wrote essays on the
analysis of soil, publishing the first systematic work on the
subject in English.
By now Kirwan suffered from dysphagia, a difficulty in
swallowing caused by problems with nervous or muscular
control. He could never eat comfortably, as swallowing would
induce convulsive movements and facial contortions. As a
result he kept his diet simple - usually nothing but milk and
ham - and he always dined alone, whether in his own home or
even visiting friends.
In 1777, Kirwan travelled to London. Here he was honoured.
In 1780 he was elected to the Royal Society, and he received
the Copley Medal, the Society's most prestigious award, for his
first scientific publication, the result of eighteen years'
experimental work on chemical bonds. His best-known work,
'Essay on Phlogiston', was published in 1787. Unlike Hutton,
Kirwan proved himself ultimately to have a flexible mind on
the subject, publicly acknowledging the final 'subversion of
the phlogiston hypothesis' by Lavoisier's debunking.-*’
Given the impediments of his origin and social difficulties,
Kirwan's success is a tribute to his ability and determination.
Perhaps he was unhappy, however, that he had to go to
England to cement his reputation. He must have felt once
172 AGES IN CHAOS

again like a subject of a conquered province, making his way

to the capital of Empire to seek the approval of his rulers.
After ten years in London he determined to return to Ireland.
Settling in Dublin, he strove to build the intellectual respect­
ability of his homeland; just as Hutton helped to found the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, so Kirwan helped establish the Royal Irish
Academy, eventually becoming president. He was struck by yet
another peculiar misfortune on his return. An American
privateer, prowling around British home waters, intercepted a
ship carrying Kirwan's library back from England. The library
was taken back to Salem, where Kirwan's precious books were
instrumental in the education of Nathaniel Bowditch, a self-
taught American mathematician and astronomer.
In Ireland at this time, things were stirring. When the
French Revolution erupted in 1789, a remarkable, if temporary
alliance was forged between the Protestants and Catholics of
the Irish intellectual elite. A series of radical political clubs
were formed, called the Societies of United Irishmen. Perhaps
it was Kirwan's own experience that drew him to support
these rebellious figures. Like Hutton, Kirwan was a figure from
Britain's subsumed Celtic fringe who was showing his
patriotism in his own way.
By the 1790s, a widower for a quarter of a century, Kirwan
had become a strange but weighty figure. He was settling into
a life of strict routine. He liked to rise very early, and to retire
early. If you wanted to visit him you were obliged to follow
certain rules: on some evenings he allotted a particular time
for visits, after which the door knocker was removed. He had
become morbidly fearful of catching a cold. He would trot
along the street, trying to minimise the time he spent out in
the chill air; if you wanted to speak with him you had to run
alongside him. Even indoors, he wore a huge cloak and hat and
several woolly scarves - it was this habit that would
eventually kill him. It is this peculiar, oddly wistful figure,
bewigged, his neck swathed in a white scarf, that peers out of
his portrait for the Royal Dublin Society.
Academically powerful, he was motivated by a deep and rare
religious conviction, and a righteousness fuelled by the
experiences of his life. In his geology, Kirwan had always been
drawn to the Neptunist theories of Werner and his predecessors
 CONSOLIDATION 173
- but born into the deep conviction of Catholicism and now
educated in the intellectual tradition of Protestantism, he had
become a Christian of a fundamentalist stripe, and he clung to
the scriptural account of creation.
Hutton's ideas appalled him.

Kirwan's first anti-Hutton salvo was a paper called 'Examination

of the Supposed Igneous Origin of Stony Substances'. Thirty
pages long, he read it in February 1793 to the Royal Irish
Academy in Dublin. The 'Examination' was a bold attempt to
demolish Hutton's geological theory, which was quoted at
length and attacked point by point.
Kirwan cited evidence from chemical experiments on rock
samples to try to prove that granite and other rocks (except
obviously volcanic ones) could not have been created by heat,
an idea that was a 'peculiarly unhappy' aspect of Hutton's
work. Kirwan then denied that all soils originated from
erosion. He argued that not all the soil gets washed away to the
sea, much of it being deposited along river banks or at their
mouths. Whereas Hutton had claimed that much of the Earth's
crust was composed of strata of sand, gravel and chalk, Kirwan
said that the base rock of the world was granite, as that rock
was the first to be laid down in the sequence of creation - just
as Werner insisted. These assertions, untestable except by
examination of the rocks themselves, must have wounded
Hutton the field geologist.
Kirwan went on to attack Hutton on the mysterious nature
of Earth's inner heat, which he called a gratuitous assumption.
How could a fire burn within the Earth without fuel or air? He
went through possible fuel sources, like sulphur, coal and
bitumen - but even if any of these existed, you could hardly
have fire without 'vital air'.
Kirwan's most devastating attack, however, was religious.
Kirwan was troubled by infinities, as philosophers always
have been. Infinite regressions lead to paradoxes. Suppose you
imagine the Earth is flat, and resting on the backs ^of four
elephants. Fine, but what are the elephants standing on? Four
more? OK, but then what? Is it pachyderms all the way down?
Kirwan saw a similar infinite regression in Hutton's cycling
worlds. Hutton (so Kirwan claimed) believed that such a
174 AGES IN CHAOS

succession of worlds must have existed from eternity, but

a succession without a beginning was a logical paradox, and
therefore to be dismissed. And besides, the notion of a cycle of
infinite worlds clearly harked back to the old Greek ideas of an
Eternal Return. The Greeks had been pagans: Hutton was
therefore trying to revive anti-Christian ideas.
His notion of the succession of worlds, proclaimed Kirwan,
was 'contrary to reason and the tenor of Mosaic history, thus
leading to an abyss from which human reason recoils'.
This hit Hutton hard. As Playfair noted, 'the attack was ...
rendered formidable, not by the strength of the arguments it
employed, but by the name of the author, the heavy charges
which it brought forward, and the gross misconceptions in
which it abounded.'
Hutton knew he had to defend himself. Even more so than
in 1785, Britain in 1793 was not a good place to be called a
heretic.

In France, the Reign of Terror had touched everybody.

The great chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was just fifty.
He was well known to the Edinburgh circle: Sir James Hall had
met him in the 1780s and had been greatly inspired, but the
Revolution had ended their contact. Lavoisier had been active
in support of the Revolution, but he had fought hard to stop
the suppression of the Academy of Sciences and other learned
bodies - in the end he fell out, fatally, with Marat. At his trial,
it was said, Lavoisier appealed for just a little more time to
complete some scientific work. The judge replied, 'The Republic
has no need of scientists.' The great mathematician Joseph-
Louis Lagrange would say, 'It took them only an instant to cut
off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another
like it.'
Lavoisier's headless corpse was thrown into a common
grave. Much must Hutton, Black, Hall and others have mourned
Lavoisier's fate, and shuddered.
For some, it all seemed a great betrayal of the heady promise
of the Revolution: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,' as
Wordsworth would write, 'but to be young was very heaven.'
Young James Watt, the twenty-year-old son of the engineer,
had been enthused by France's great celebration of liberty, but
 CONSOLIDATION 175
became foolishly mixed up with French politics. He was
censured for carrying the British flag into the revolutionary
assembly. It has been said that Robespierre assailed him as a
British spy, after which he was forced to leave Paris. The more
mundane truth is probably that he had to leave on business.
Watt senior was not impressed with this youthful folly, and must
have been relieved when young James came home in 1794.
The Reign of Terror provoked a strong reaction in Britain.
Scotland, nearly a century after the Union, was not notably
democratic. Thanks to a tough property qualification, fewer
than one man in twenty (and no women, of course) had the
vote. The affluent new middle class in Edinburgh and the
other cities, created by the economic growth since the Union,
had no political voice. Power still rested with the lairds and
landowners - and with Henry Dundas, the London govern­
ment's representative on Scottish affairs. 'King Harry the Ninth',
as he was known, ruled through patronage in the church, the
law, academia and politics.
In the wake of hard times in Scotland - strikes in Glasgow
against high food prices, a failed harvest in 1792 - there had
been some agitation for enhanced democracy. In July 1792,
some Edinburgh citizens formed a Scottish Association of the
Friends of the People, advocating a Britain-wide programme of
reform.
Now - with revolution and terror exploding in what had
been the most aristocratic and absolutist of European nations
- life was suddenly serious, and a sense developed that one's
hold on position, power and wealth was only conditional.
Among the circles of the Enlightenment, it no longer seemed
so clever to flaunt wealth and excess, or to play at sedition,
however subtly. The clubs, with their overtones of fraternity,
suddenly seemed to have sinister undertones: even the Beggar's
Benison, after all, was playfully Jacobite. Freemasonry came
under suspicion, and for a time the opening of new lodges was
forbidden.
Any signs of unrest among the masses had to bebriskly
stamped upon. In a letter to Black, James Watt senior wrote:
'The Rabble of this country are the mine of Gunpowder that
will one day blow up and violent will be the explosion.' There
was a massive crackdown on every suspected subversive
T7(> AGES IN CHAOS

group. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, suspended habeas

corpus. Radical campaigners, such as proponents of extended
suffrage, were regarded as seditious. In 1795 one 'traitor7 was
publicly beheaded in Edinburgh High Street: on that blood-
splattered day, the glories of the Scottish Enlightenment must
have seemed transient indeed.
The Church was central to Britain's social structure, and any
challenge to it could be seen as a threat to the interest of the
government and the propertied classes. Edward Gibbon was
very aware of this. His Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire
had made it difficult to admire many of the greatest saints of
the early Christian Church. He was very unkind, for example,
to St Simeon Stylites, whose claim to fame was spending
thirty years on top of a twenty-metre column in the desert:
Gibbon compared Simeon's absurd career unfavourably to
those of the great 'pagan' thinkers of earlier times, like Cicero.
Gibbon learned to be cautious, for there were statues of the
realm available to punish anyone who attacked Christianity.
In the midst of all this, Kirwan's charges of atheism and heresy
against Hutton were disturbing indeed.
Ill as he was, the very day he read Kirwan's attack, Hutton
turned to the only means he had of fighting back: his much-
postponed book-length exposition of his geological theory.
Hutton, the bedridden invalid, grew ever more gaunt, obsessively
writing, writing, writing, as if he could prove with words what
he could no longer demonstrate with his rocks.
 i8
‘A passage from one condition
of thought to another'
Hutton's book would be called Theory of the Earth with Proofs
and Illustrations.
He planned it in four parts. By September 1795 Hutton had
had printed all 1187 pages of his first two volumes, and lacked
only the six illustration plates to complete them - one of these
was John Clerk's charming image of the Jedburgh unconfor­
mity. His Edinburgh publisher would be William Creech, the
old friend who had published Burns's poetry. The volumes
would be sold at fourteen shillings in boards, and nine shillings
and eight pence wholesale.
With the Principles of Knowledge and Theory of the Earth
both still in preparation, Hutton was well enough to give a series
of readings to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on his theories of
physics. He gathered these into another book, A Dissertation
Upon the Philosophy of Light, Heat and Fire, published in
1794 (in fact it appeared before the Theory of the Earth}. Here
he gave a full statement, at long last, of his theory of heat as
an aspect of 'solar substance'. It is a cruel irony that in the same
year that Hutton's phlogiston-tinged tome was published, the
founder of modern theories of combustion was brutally executed
by the Terror.
This work seems not to have attracted much attention, but
it was another crucial element of Hutton's geological theory.
With this book, his Principles of Knowledge and his writings
on geology, Hutton was endeavouring to produce a complete
and consistent body of physical theory and epistemological
methodology to support his assertions about the Earth: his
non-geological works were just as important to him as the
overtly geological. It is a peculiar tragedy that his writings
were so long and impenetrable that nobody at the time really
understood what he was up to - and indeed only in recent
decades have modern scholars managed to piece it all together.
178 AGES IN CHAOS

Before the end of 1795, the first two volumes of the Theory
of the Earth were published at last. The first included a
reworking of Hutton's 1785 paper, with additions and
expansions. Using material from other old essays, he presented
his ideas on the origin of so-called 'primitive' rocks like granite
and limestone. He cited specifics, like a bit of limestone he
had found in a quarry in Wales which had borne the
impression of a sea creature.
He went on to a new piece of evidence for his theory of
underground heat: the existence of coal and bituminous strata.
These strata, laden with hydrocarbons, are found all over the
world, interleaved with other strata obviously formed at the
bottom of the sea. But Hutton's opponents had argued that the
bituminous material had infiltrated pre-existing strata,
turning the rocks to coal. Hutton railed: 'The wonder now is
how men of science, in the present enlightened age, should suffer
such language of ignorance and credulity to pass uncensured.'
Above all, Hutton expanded on his theory of the cycling
Earth, quoting his dramatic discoveries of the unconformities
at Jedburgh and Siccar Point.
His second volume was a discussion of the evolution of
landforms. Hutton gave a beautiful description of a fertile
plain being destroyed by an encroaching river, and explored the
example of the English Channel, bounded by chalk cliffs that
are being steadily eaten away. He speculated that since
England and France were obviously once joined it might be
possible to work out from the present rate of erosion of the
Channel's walls how long ago they had been split (the answer
would have been around 80,000 years, which is of the right
order of magnitude). This volume is now regarded as a
foundation of the modern discipline of 'geomorphology', the
science of Earth's surface features.
The Theory was the forum that Hutton used to fight back
against Kirwan's attack. Hutton wasn't impressed with Kirwan's
talk of experiments on bits of granite. He pointed out that he
had been 'anxious to warn the reader' against imagining you
could compare the results of subterranean heat, with its
tremendous intensity, temperature and compression, with
anything you could emulate on the surface of the Earth. 'Yet,
notwithstanding all the precaution I had taken,' he griped, 'our
 CONSOLIDATION 179
author [Kirwan] has bestowed four quarto pages' on exactly
such false comparisons.
Hutton also replied briskly to Kirwan regarding the source of
his inner heat. He simply put the question aside, as he had in
1785. He had never claimed that his heat was based on fire.
Besides, his heat didn't really need a source. Endlessly
circulating within the body of the Earth, it was a dynamical
fluid always available to repair the substance of the Earth.
Kirwan would later call this dismissive response 'wholly
paradoxical'. But Hutton knew he was on thin ice here, and in
his long, rambling, repetitive chapters, he lost his way a little.
In one place he even unwisely suggested that the heat might
after all be fuelled by coal, produced from a previous geological
cycle's plant life. His nerve had momentarily failed; better to
have stuck to the line that the source of heat was simply
outside his scope.
As for the paradox of the 'eternal' world, here Hutton was
able to hit back hard. He had been misunderstood. He had
never claimed that the world is eternal. He had only said that
we have a limited ability to reconstruct Earth's past or foresee
its future. Earth surely had a beginning and will surely have an
end, but it was beyond his methodology to see them.
Hutton closed his first two volumes with a last statement on
the divine design of the globe, in language that once again
recalled Aristotle: 'We live in a world where order everywhere
prevails and where final causes are as well known, at least, as
those which are efficient ... Thus, the circulation of the blood
is the efficient cause of life, but life is the final cause, not only
for the circulation of the blood but for the revolution of the
globe' (my emphasis). After all this time he had come back to
the themes of the medical studies of his twenties - the
microcosm and macrocosm, the metaphorical unity of body
and world.
Hutton planned two more volumes. We know from
surviving manuscripts (see the Epilogue) that there would have
been at least ten chapters, six of them drawing on essays he
had written between 1785 and 1787. These included write-ups
of his visits to Glen Tilt, Galloway and Arran, essays on his
reading of Alpine travelogues, and reports of the mineralogy of
the Pyrenees, Calabria and Sicily, based on his readings. But
i8o AGES IN CHAOS

there was a problem. Unlike the first -two volumes of the

Theory, the latter segments required many engravings, mostly
based on drawings by John Clerk. As 1796 wore on, Hutton's
health deteriorated and his medical bills mounted. He Awas
running out of money, and the process of engraving was halted.
In the end, the third and fourth volumes were not published
in Hutton's lifetime. The Theory of the Earth as it eventually
reached the public was only half of what Hutton had intended.
And it wasn't enough.

Hutton's two volumes actually attracted less attention than

the 1788 paper had done. Hutton was known to be seriously
ill, and wasn't raising any new issues: this was old news. And
anyhow, the work was infuriatingly difficult to read. Lengthy
as it is, the Theory is a hasty work - the old saw that it takes
more time to write a short book than a long one was never
better demonstrated.
Hutton has a reputation for being notoriously unreadable. I
don't find his style in his formal papers all that bad, even if his
prose sometimes reads as if it has been translated from another
language, and Hutton the scientist certainly isn't as engaging as
the scurrilous rogue we glimpse in his letters. It can't be denied
that the most cogent account of his theory is the Abstract, the
most unreadable of his multiple volumes: the shorter the
better. But the modern legend of unreadability is surely
compounded by a reluctance by some later mythologisers to
recognise the logical basis of what Hutton was saying: that his
theory was not a modern scientific argument proceeding
primarily from the data, but an argument from final causes.
Hutton didn't even manage to convince his friends. To save
a little money, he had sent them copies of the books as loose
sheets, which they had to pay to have bound.
In December 1795 Watt sent him bits of granite from
Cornwall, odd mixtures of metal ores, and stones from the
Wrekin and the Malvern hills. Watt had been working on
mechanical contrivances for 'pneumatic medicine', gadgets
intended to cure illnesses - especially tuberculosis, from which
his own daughter had died - with a mixture of gases. But there
was nothing even the great engineer could build to help his old
friend: 'I wish I could contrive remedies for your several
 CONSOLIDATION l8l
complaints, but alas I cannot cure my own, though much
lighter!'
Later that month, Watt wrote to Hutton from a tour of
North Wales, bemoaning the lack of experimental confirma­
tion in Hutton's work. 'Without pretending to be a believer, I
see much to commend and admire. [But] I do not believe even
in mechanics without experiment to which test I wish to bring
all theoretical opinions if possible & so I should have yours
served.' Watt continued with speculations about experimental
geology, and about the rocks of Wales. 'I have some more facts
I mean to trouble you with at intervals, if you think them
sufficiently interesting. In the mean time I shall be glad to hear
from you especially, how you continue to support your very
cruel disease, most sincerely praying an alleviation of your
sufferings & begging to be remembered to Dr Black St other
friends. I remain, Dear Sir, your affectionate friend, James
Watt.' It was the last letter Watt wrote to Hutton, and Hutton
did not reply, though Black kept Watt informed of Hutton's
condition.
Still Hutton's opponents assailed him. In October 1796, his
old adversary Jean André Deluc published a forty-four page,
three-part review of Theory of the Earth. It was a ferocious
assault. Geology could never be disentangled from the sacred
history, wrote Deluc. There was no evidence for a succession
of worlds except in Hutton's imagination; Hutton's 'theory'
wasn't an argument about nature but an invention specifically
intended to attack Moses' holy account.
Now Richard Kirwan returned to the fray. He prepared a
series of three essays 'On the Primitive State of the Globe and
Its Subsequent Catastrophe' for his Royal Irish Academy, and
read the first of them on 19 November 1796. Kirwan's new
work amounted to a magnificent statement of a new Neptunist
theory of the Earth.
It was obvious, he argued, that much of the globe was once
in a soft or liquid state, dissolved in a uniform and chaotic
ocean. The materials had settled out in orderly layers. The
universal ocean had subsided and the continents emerged: it
had been a once-and-for-all formation event. There was no
room for Hutton's cycles, and certainly no evidence for them.
Kirwan tackled the old problem of the corpses of marine
i82 AGES IN CHAOS

animals being found buried in the rocks -at the tops of moun­
tains. Sea creatures hadn't existed when primitive mountains
were formed - so the fossils must have been put there by a
later inundation. That also explained the bones of elephants
(in fact mammoths) and other tropical beasts that had been
found in Siberia. Kirwan imagined Noah's great Flood starting
in the southern hemisphere and rushing north: the animals
must have been swept from Africa to Siberia by the deluge.
He regretted the way 'recent speculations' had shaded into
atheism and infidelity. For Kirwan, the purpose of science was,
as it had been for Burnet, as it always had been, to find an
explanation of the world to match the ultimate truth, the reve­
lation of scripture. If properly pursued, he said triumphantly,
'geology naturally ripens, or (to use a mineralogical expression)
graduates into religion'. And Kirwan's own theory of the Earth
was, unlike Hutton's, fully in accord with Old Testament
writings: Kirwan wrote proudly, '[My] account of the primeval
state of the globe and of the principal catastrophes it under­
went, I am bold to say, [is as] Moses presents to us.' Kirwan's
theory was a tour de force of theological science, perhaps the
last of the magnificent edifices to be erected by the Biblical
system-builders - and it was the utter antithesis of everything
Hutton had argued for.
Hutton and Kirwan never met. But these two figures, both
eccentric in their different ways, had become engaged in a war
fought through journals and speeches and books. It was a feud
to which the logic of their lives had led them.
Kirwan was a working scientist, and on one level his riposte
to Hutton was an overdue scientific test of his ideas in the
crucible of a peer review. But the argument between Hutton
and Kirwan was at heart not just about science - and perhaps
not really about science at all: it was about differing theories
of the nature of God. That was why Hutton was so hurt by any
implication or charge of atheism, aside from any trouble it
could cause him or his friends. He was anything but atheistic;
it was just that his view of God was radically different from
Kirwan's.
And the feud was bitter. If Kirwan complained that Hutton's
vision of 'no vestige of a beginning' led to 'an abyss from which
human reason recoils', Hutton had responded by saying that
 CONSOLIDATION 183
'the abyss from which the man of science should recoil is that
of ignorance'.
Kirwan must have anticipated a fresh response from Hutton,
and perhaps relished the prospect of another round of the great
battle. But it was too late.
In 1796 Hutton suffered another relapse. 'He was again saved
from the danger that immediately threatened him, but his
constitution had materially suffered, and nothing could restore
him to his former strength.' Confined to the house, emaciated
and in much pain, Hutton became weaker. But his mind
remained active. He continued to receive his friends, and he
tinkered with work.

After his publication of 1795, Hutton devoted much of his

remaining efforts to what would have become another
immense book, his thousand-page Elements of Agriculture.
Though this sadly never reached a wide public, Hutton set
out much wisdom in it: on crop rotation, the effect of climate
on plant growth, soil fertility, farm management, fertilisers,
animal husbandry and other topics. He also united his agricul­
tural thinking with the broader themes of his philosophy.
Through agriculture, human science cooperated with the
mechanisms of nature to further God's purpose, that Earth
should serve as a fertile, habitable globe.
Though Hutton had been reluctantly driven to farming, he
was always proud of his achievements at Slighhouses. In the
1788 publication of his 'Theory of the Earth', he listed his
honours as MD (Doctor of Medicine), FRS Edin. (Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh) - and Member of the Royal Academy
of Agriculture at Paris. It is a mark of Hutton's agricultural
reputation that he was one of just twenty-three foreigners,
drawn from across Europe and America, chosen as members of
this prestigious and influential society. (The most famous
member of all was probably 'M. le general Washington'.) Though
in Britain he was known as 'the famous fossil philosopher', to
quote Watt, in France Hutton had undoubtedly built up a
reputation as an agricultural expert, and even received visitors
on the subject. Unfortunately, all records of Hutton's involve­
ment with the Academy were lost in a disastrous flood in
1910, which destroyed the Academy's archives.
184 AGES IN CHAOS

In a sense, Hutton's thinking had once again come full

circle. He knew that his book would not attract a large
audience, if it was ever published at all, but he worked on it for
his own satisfaction: writing was a comfort to him, as well as
a means of expression. He took pleasure in returning to a
subject which had been 'in a manner the study of [his] life'.
His health was worsening, and Elements bears the scars of
exhaustion and illness. Like his other late works, it is strung
together from earlier essays, leaving it rambling, repetitive and
poorly structured. On some pages of the manuscript, you can
see pencil marks where Hutton meant to reorder the para­
graphs. But the lines are unsteady, a sign of his increasing
weakness, and they often break off halfway through. It seems
likely that he never even read the dictated manuscript all the
way through.
The last chapter stumbles to a halt, mundanely, in the
middle of a discussion about potatoes.

Hutton's friends tried to support him. They still wrote to him,

sending him interesting samples and geological chit-chat.
Hutton himself continued to contribute to the fledgling
Royal Society of Edinburgh, on the questions of written versus
spoken languages, the geology of Arthur's Seat, and 'The
Flexibility of the Brazilian Stone': 'No quality is more
inconsistent with the character of a stone than flexibility. A
flexible stone, therefore, presents an idea which naturally
strikes us with surprise ...'
A paper on 'The Sulphurating of Metals' - to do with his
phlogiston theories - was read for him on 9 May 1796. In their
'History of the Society' notes, the editors of the Transactions
write, 'Such are the ideas which Dr Hutton had formed on the
sulphuration of metal, and the theory by which it must be
explained; and they are rendered more interesting, by being the
last communication made by that ingenious and profound
philosopher.'
In the spring of T797, Hutton was pleased to receive the
third and fourth volumes of De Saussure's travelogues of the
Alps, to the earlier parts of which he had referred extensively
in his Theory. It was like one last field trip, conducted in the
mind.
 CONSOLIDATION 185
Even in these last days, despite the critics, he may have
continued to enjoy exploring his own ideas. Playfair writes
that, 'With [Hutton's] relish for whatever is beautiful and
sublime in science, we may easily conceive what pleasure he
derived from his own geological speculations. The novelty and
grandeur of the objects offered by them to the imagination, the
simple and uniform order given to the whole natural history of
the Earth, and, above all, the views opened of the wisdom that
governs nature, are things to which hardly any man could be
insensible,- but to him they were matter, not of transient
delight, but of solid and permanent happiness ... No author
was ever more disposed to consider the enjoyment of them, as
the full and adequate reward of his labours.'
On Saturday 26 March Hutton woke in a good deal of pain.
He tried to work, making some notes about a new naming
system for minerals. But the pain worsened and in the evening
he started to shiver. His doctor, the younger James Russel, was
called.
Hutton had written in the Principles of Knowledge that
death was no longer to be seen as a disconnection between
mind and reality, but simply a change in the way the mind
perceives things: 'We are to consider death only as passage
from one condition of thought to another.' Perhaps that
comforted him. But Hutton, the man who had given Earth a
history deep beyond human imagining, had now himself run
out of time.
As Playfair reports, Russel arrived too late. Hutton used his
last strength to reach out his hand towards his doctor.
THREE

Uplift
 19
7 could see the marks
of his hammer’
Hutton's friends were devastated. Playfair wrote of 'the
consideration of how much of his knowledge had perished
with himself, and ... how much of the light collected by a long
life of experience and observation, was now completely
extinguished'.
In October 1797 Playfair visited Arran. He clambered
gamely around the island - 'I can endure a little hardship when
put in the balance against knowledge' - and studied basalt
dykes and contacts between granite and schists. Playfair wrote
to Sir John Hall, 'The junctions I saw were all visited by Dr H.
At one of them I could see the marks of his hammer, (at least
I thought so), and could not without emotion think of the
enthusiasm with which he must have viewed it. I was never
more sensible of the truth of what I remember you said one
day when we were looking at the Dykes in the Water of Leith,
since the D's death, "that these Phenomena had now lost half
their value".'
There would be no neat resolution to Hutton's arguments
with Kirwan and his other critics. But if the man had died, his
ideas lived on - and the battle over them was only just
beginning.
In the year of Hutton's death, for example, the third edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica weighed in with a
twelve-page critique. The Encyclopaedia attacked what it saw
as Hutton's claim that the world was eternal, and stated that
the world was full of evidence for the Flood. Hutton had even
got his chemistry wrong, said the Encyclopaedia. There were
other reactions from the British Isles, and several from the
Continent - including one from Hutton's old foe Faujas, who
dismissed Hutton's thesis as 'a memoir containing general
views of the subject [rather] than a body of observations'.
In the face of these attacks, Playfair, Hall and others decided
190 AGES IN CHAOS

to carry Hutton's arguments forward for him: they would

amass evidence where he could not; they would speak, where
he was silent.

Sir James Hall had never quite bought Hutton's theory: 'I must
own that on reading Dr Hutton's first geological publication I
was induced to reject the system entirely,' he said. There had
followed 'three years of almost daily warfare with Dr Hutton'
over the theory, which at last Hall had begun to view 'with less
and less repugnance'. Hall remained fascinated by the idea that
you could explore geological ideas in the laboratory, and
Hutton's death gave him a poignant opportunity to continue
this work.
By 1790, a heat origin for granite had become crucial to
Hutton's argument. But Hall as a chemist knew that there
were problems with the idea that granite had solidified out of
a melt. Actual experiments on melting granite and cooling it
again had resulted not in the crystal-laden stuff you found in
the field but in a shapeless glass. Similarly basalt, when melted
and cooled in the laboratory, didn't look much like field
samples either.
In 1790, Hall had visited a glass factory in Leith. There was
an accident, and Hall happened to see what happens when
glass cools slowly. Under these conditions glass can crystallise.
Perhaps, Hall thought, if you cooled molten granite slowly
enough you would recover not a glassy mess, but a crystalline
structure. It was an obvious thing to test in the lab. That same
year, Hall gave a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in
which he discussed Hutton's field observations on granite and
basalt, and referred to well-known experiments on melting
crushed feldspar and quartz. He went on to speculate about
how crystals of different types could be produced by differing
cooling rates in the bowels of the Earth. To Hall, this survey
was just the start of what could have become a programme of
laboratory tests of Hutton's ideas.
But Hall had encountered unexpected hostility from Hutton
himself.
The trouble was, Hutton had come to believe that the
conditions of great temperature and pressure that surely pre­
vailed deep in the Earth were out of reach of any conceivable
 UPLIFT 191
apparatus. He censured those who 'judge of the great operations
of the mineral kingdom, from having kindled a fire, and looked
into the bottom of a little crucible'. He may have been nervous
that negative results from flawed experiments would do his
arguments more harm than good. Hall's reply was that 'the
imitation of the natural process is an object which may be
pursued with rational expectation of success'.
Nonetheless, out of respect for the older man - in 1790
Hutton was sixty-four, Hall a mere twenty-nine - Hall set
aside his experiments. 'I considered myself bound, in practice,
to pay deference to his opinion, in a field which he had so
nobly occupied, and abstained, during the remainder of his life,
from the prosecution of [my] experiments ... [But] in 1798
[after Hutton's death], I resumed the subject with some eager­
ness, being still of opinion, that the chemical law which forms
the basis of the Huttonian theory, ought, in the first place, to
be investigated experimentally.'
Hall began by melting bits of Edinburgh basalt in the furnace
of an iron foundry. If the basalt was allowed to cool rapidly it
formed a black glass, but, in a dogged series of tests, Hall
managed to slow the cooling, and by his twenty-seventh try he
had indeed managed to produce a crystallisation that looked
very like natural basalt. While the arguments continued over
Hutton's theories, in the laboratories Hall continued his
patient exploration.

Playfair was always the leader and the most ardent of the new
'Huttonians'.
His first task, Playfair decided, was to produce a biographical
memoir of Hutton, incorporating reflections on his work. He
began to gather material from Hutton's friends and family. He
consulted Black, though the ageing chemist had by now retired
from his teaching post. Hall provided letters Hutton had
written to Hall's father. Isabella described her brother's early
life. The Clerks surely reminisced to order.
In the process of researching his biography, though,'Playfair
reread Hutton's book-length Theory of the Earth, and was
appalled at how badly written it was. In an age in which the
elegance of a theory's expression added greatly to its chances
of a good reception, Hutton's foggy impenetrability was going
192. AGES IN CHAOS

to be a serious obstacle to his' acceptance. So Playfair - urged

on by Robertson, who had himself helped during Hutton's
literary struggles - took it on himself to rewrite the theory.
Playfair presented the result to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh in June 1799, and published it as Illustrations of the
Huttonian Theory of the Earth in 1802. Playfair's logical
restructuring of Hutton's material certainly makes it a lot more
readable and cogent. To counter Kirwan's attacks, Playfair
added a series of 'notes', in fact amounting to hundreds of
pages. He quoted new examples of unconformities in Scotland,
Yorkshire and Cumberland, and more granite intrusions.
Playfair dismissed the decay-ridden theories of Burnet,
Buffon and others as irrational: 'The death of nature herself is
the distant but gloomy object that terminates our view, and
reminds us of the wild fictions of the Scandinavian mythology,
according to which, annihilation is at last to extend its empire
even to the gods.' By contrast, Hutton's theory was beautiful
and inevitable: Earth was 'a system of wise and provident
economy' designed for the support of life. It was surely the
elegance and generosity of the theory, as well as loyalty to the
man himself, that attracted Hutton such intense support from
intellectuals like Playfair and Hall.
One of Playfair's audience that June day was Francis Horner,
a friend of a friend. As Napoleon's war raged across Europe, and
civilisation itself seemed under threat, Homer mused on the
wider implications of Hutton's theory: 'And shall we have
future theories of the moral history of the Earth ... tracing
back many former transitions from civilisation to barbarism,
and presenting, in the future prospect, an endless, irksome suc­
cession of the same changes?' (In fact, cyclical theories of
history would indeed become fashionable in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.)
The theory Playfair presented so skilfully, however, wasn't
quite Hutton's.
Aiming for a wider acceptance, Playfair had subtly modernised
his friend's work. He downplayed Hutton's rather old-
fashioned reliance on arguments from design. He mentioned
final causes and God's purpose a few times, but with nothing
like the centrality and emphasis of Hutton's original. On the
other hand, he emphasised Hutton's reliance on evidence. As
 UPLIFT 193
he would write in his biography, 'from his first outset in
science, [Hutton] had pursued the track of experiment and
observation, and it was not till after being long exercised in
this school, that he entered on the field of general and abstract
speculations.' In fact, as we've seen, though Hutton's field­
work was meticulous, his 'abstract speculations' had from the
beginning done a great deal to guide his thinking.
Playfair also skated over Hutton's denial of historical
change. Hutton had argued that the rocks showed the traces of
previous cycles, but that these cycles were like ours in every
important way. By now, however, the stratigraphers were
coming up with what looked like clinching proof, through the
fossils, that there was a trace of some kind of history in the
rocks. So Playfair skipped over Hutton's ahistorical perfect
world, and claimed that you could read a unique history in the
rocks' 'marks of the lapse of time'.
In so intelligently recasting Hutton's eighteenth-century
thinking in a nineteenth-century light, Playfair saved Hutton's
ideas, and presented them to a new generation. Charles Lyell,
the most influential geologist of the nineteenth century,
would get his Hutton from the Illustrations. But the 'Hutton'
of Playfair's retelling wasn't quite the original. From this point
on, James Hutton himself began to slip deeper into shadow.
Joseph Black was also in Playfair's audience that day - but
Black's time, too, was almost done.
In later years Black had suffered from frail health, and every
time he caught a cold he found himself spitting up blood. He
preserved his energies with a modest and abstemious diet. It
was over such a meal that he would eventually die, reported
his friend Ferguson: 'Being at table, with his usual fare, some
bread, a few prunes, and a measured quantity of milk diluted
with water; and having the cup in his hand when the last
stroke of his pulse was to be given, he appeared to have set it
down on his knees, which were joined together, and in this
action expired, without spilling a drop - as if an experiment
had been purposely made, to evince the facility with which he
departed.'

If Hutton's friends were writing books about him, then so were

his enemies.
194 AGES IN CHAOS

In 1799, Richard Kirwan published his Geological Essays.

This was nothing less than a book-length attack on Hutton,
now two years dead. The formidable Irishman, reclusive,
eccentric and obsessive as ever, ripped into Hutton's theory
once again, as well as his attempts to answer Kirwan's own
earlier objections.
The questions were familiar, but restated with authority. No
experimenter had yet shown how chalky matter could be fused
and crystallised. Kirwan didn't deny Hall's experimental
results, but just because Hall had managed to persuade molten
basalt to cool into a stony form, that didn't prove this was
what went on in the ground.
Besides, Hall's tests were a distraction from the main issue,
for they considered the action of the heat, not its source,
which continued to be the subject of great controversy. Where
was all this heat supposed to come from? Brushing aside
Hutton's protests that his 'heat' was not necessarily the
product of burning, Kirwan asked how there could be enough
combustible matter or 'vital air' - oxygen - inside the Earth, to
fuel such a mighty source of energy.
An even more serious attack about the question of heat was
made by John Murray, who wasn't at all impressed by the idea
of the Earth having a fixed reservoir of heat that circulated
endlessly. Heat just wasn't like that, Murray argued: the planet
would tend to a uniform temperature as the heat spread itself
out, and then all the heat would dissipate into the air. Playfair
responded by considering the analogy of a metal bar with one
end held in a fire. So long as you maintained the fire, heat would
flow along the bar, and it would remain hotter at one end than
the other, never reaching a uniform temperature. Perhaps the
Earth was like that, provided some central source of heat
continued to heat up the inner layers.
Ultimately all this went nowhere. Hutton's model of heat -
of circulating immaterial fluid - had nothing to do with the
standard theories then being discussed. There could be no
meeting of minds, and the heat debate would melt away in the
face of the modern theories of thermodynamics developed
during the nineteenth century.
Still the battles went on, as 'the Vulcanist and Neptunist
war raged in the hall of [the Royal Society of Edinburgh] and in
 UPLIFT 195
the class-room of the University'. These debates helped to
generate interest in geology throughout the United Kingdom,
and to establish the new Royal Society of Edinburgh's own
reputation.
Hutton's friends were concerned, however. Hutton con­
tinued to come under attack for his supposed atheism, and the
chances of shifting the opinions of the Neptunists, with their
lingering theological fringe, were slender. It seemed possible
that Hutton and his ideas would soon sink out of sight, like
those of so many system-builders before him. It was as if a
dead man was becoming more dead with time.

In 1803, Playfair presented his Biographical Account of the

Late fames Hutton to the Edinburgh Royal Society. The book
version published two years later would become the primary
source for biographical information on Hutton.
Even before this willing audience, Playfair faced a challenge.
Hutton's primary achievement - his geological theory - was at
a low point in its intellectual fortunes, and even his closest
friends were prepared to admit that Hutton had been some­
thing of an oddity in Edinburgh's fashionable circles. His work
seemed to hark back to a vanishing era of system-building in
the absence of facts, a mode of discourse which was becoming
increasingly discredited.
But Playfair did a magnificent job. He sketched what he
could reconstruct of Hutton's early life: he didn't know much
about Hutton's time as a farmer, and little about his early
personal life, notably the scandal that had driven Hutton to
the farm in the first place. He summarised the development
of Hutton's theory, noting how important Black's chemical
experiments had proved to be. And in a final, long section,
Playfair gave an affectionate pen portrait of his friend as
scientist and man: 'Dr Hutton possessed, in an eminent degree,
the talents, the acquirements, and the temper, which entitle a
man to the name of a philosopher ... He was upright, candid,
and sincere; strongly attached to his friends; ready to sacrifice
anything to assist them; humane and charitable.' Those who
attended must mostly have known Hutton and been attached
to his memory, and Playfair duly gave them a eulogy - even if
his sanitised portrait didn't quite fit the facts.
196 AGES IN CHAOS

It was effective, though. In the face of the continued

hostility of the critic, it inspired a group of Hutton's friends to
formalise their Huttonianism still further, and support his
ideas more systematically. In death as in life, Hutton's story is
one of friendship, loyalty and mutual support, among his
friends at least - this had never extended, of course, to his son.
In June 1803, Playfair, Hall, Walter Scott, Francis Horner and
others did what Edinburgh gentlemen did best: they formed a
new social club. It was called the Friday Club, and would meet
weekly at a tavern in Shakespeare Street; this genteel gather­
ing would form the focus of Huttonian arguments for the next
fifteen years. The Huttonians argued in print and in public
with Hutton's critics, and they determined to go back into the
field and into the laboratory to gather more evidence to shore
up the theory. In 1807, for example, Playfair went back to Glen
Tilt, still the cause of great controversy over granite, to conduct
a more careful survey.
The Huttonians even used Edinburgh itself to try to win over
more converts. They developed a habit of taking interested
parties to the geological highlights of Edinburgh, as well as to
sites further afield, like Siccar Point. One visitor remarked
that Edinburgh, with the grandeur of its setting, would - unlike
London, for instance - inspire even the most ignorant to ask
questions about the rocks.
Sometimes these tactics were effective. A young geologist
called George Silliman, torn between the Huttonian and
Wernerian camps, would be swayed by the evidence: 'Though
I am by no means a convert to this theory, I cannot but be
impressed with sentiments of deep respect towards the author
of it, a man of original genius who saw with his own eyes, who
saw clearly, and knew what was worthy of being seen.'

Meanwhile, Hall continued his patient tests on heated and

crushed rocks.
In December 1795, when James Watt wrote to Hutton from
Birmingham to give his first reaction to the Theory of the
Earth - 'I do not believe even in Mechanics without experi­
mentation' - he had suggested a new way to test Hutton's
theory. Watt knew a great deal about furnaces, and thought it
ought to be possible to use a furnace to reach very high
 UPLIFT 197
temperatures and pressures. He suggested sealing a sample
inside a gun barrel along with a little water, and heating it in
a furnace. The water's high pressure would simulate condi­
tions inside the Earth. You could use such an apparatus to try
to turn wood into coal, and chalk into marble, as Hutton
predicted should happen in such conditions.
Hall eventually ran more than five hundred experiments
along these lines. He would put his samples of limestone in
paper cartridges inside common gun barrels, ram them full of
clay, and then seal both ends with iron. Watt, it turned out,
had underestimated the difficulties. Some of Hall's gun barrels
failed - one of them wrecked the furnace he put it in - but he
did succeed in getting a suggestive series of melts. He went on
to try porcelain tubes rather than gun barrels.
Hall investigated what happened to animal and vegetable
remains under such conditions, and became convinced that
coal really was made up from such remains. The material was
so reduced by the heat that he concluded the volume of coal to
be found in the ground today must be just a fraction of that of
the living matter once deposited on the surface.
Hall's most striking results came from tests on calcites -
chalk, limestone, spar, marble, and the shells of sea creatures.
He found that such samples could indeed be converted into a
crystalline marble at high temperatures, and there was no
doubt that they did indeed melt. In one test he would stand
periwinkle shells upright inside his gun barrels,- when he
retrieved the samples he would find the remains of the shells,
with rounded edges sticking out of a hardened mass, or else
they would disappear altogether into the melt.
All this persuaded Hall at last that Hutton's ideas about the
effects of heat must be essentially right, and that the Earth's
inner heat - whatever its source and nature - must therefore
exist. The Huttonians must have regretted that Hutton
himself had been so resistant to such tests in his lifetime.
Hall was a true pioneer in the discipline that has ^become
known as 'experimental petrology', in which rocks of different
compositions are subjected to differing regimes of temperature
and pressure, in an attempt to model what happens to them in
the interior of the Earth. It only became possible to simulate
extremely severe conditions during the twentieth century: by
198 AGES IN CHAOS

the 1950s, though, experimenters could model conditions that

prevailed throughout Earth's crust, by the 1980s they had
'reached' depths of seven hundred kilometres - and more
recently still, a miniature apparatus using diamond anvils has
actually reproduced the conditions to be encountered two
thousand kilometres deep, at the boundary between Earth's
mantle and its core.
In 1804, James Watt's twenty-seven-year-old son Gregory,
perhaps inspired by his father, decided to repeat some of Hall's
experiments, but on a monumental scale. He took two hundred
kilograms of basalt to an ironworks and tried melting it. What
he got was a huge glassy mess, but it was a start.
Gregory was a talented young man. On meeting fourteen-
year-old Gregory, Hutton had been fond of him: 'I was never
more pleased with a young man,' he told Watt. 'He is every­
thing that one could wish; he is both the gentleman & the
philosopher. I make no doubt but he will succeed very well in
business,- & I hope his chymical knowledge will be of use to
him.' But this was not to be. The same year he published his
first results on basalt, Gregory died of consumption - much to
the distress of his father, who had already lost a daughter.
Meanwhile, another of Hutton's old friends enjoyed a great
triumph.
In May 2002, a historian at the National Maritime Museum
in Greenwich was going through the papers of Admiral Lord
Nelson. He chanced to turn over a long-disregarded list of
names, written out in Nelson's own hand. On the back of this
scrap is a scrawled map - really not much more than a doodle
of dotted lines and sweeping curves. It doesn't look like much,
but the historian immediately recognised its significance.
In 1805, at a dinner party on board the Victory, Nelson told
his admirals of his battle plan for Trafalgar. He would describe
their reaction as like 'an electric shock'. Some would even
weep. And during the party he sketched his tactics on this bit
of paper. A thick diagonal line represents the enemy fleet. But
the British fleet is formed into three divisions and it cuts the
enemy line in two places. In this hasty sketch you can sense
Nelson's animation, and the tension of that dinner party;
where the British line of attack cuts into the French fleet,
Nelson's pen has dug deeply into the paper.
 UPLIFT 199
The plan worked, of course - and these were precisely the
tactics John Clerk of Eldin had been working out with the cork
models that had so fascinated Walter Scott. After the battle,
the captain of the Defiance sent Clerk Nelson's memorandum
to his commanders on how the battle was to be fought: 'Mr
Clerk will perceive with great pleasure that the present form
of battle is completely accordant with his own notions.'

As the years wore away, the Huttonians' persistence slowly

paid off in establishing a community of support.
The new science of geology polarised into two camps, the
Wernerians and Huttonians. The Royal Society of Edinburgh,
and the newly founded Geological Society of London, leaned
towards Hutton, but Werner had powerful disciples, even in
Edinburgh. Both sides could point to supporting data, and both
theories were consistent and well-founded. Not only that, the
fringe of the Wernerian camp still contained many weighty
figures, not least Kirwan, who clung to the Biblical chronology.
To them, Hutton remained atheistic.
The stakes couldn't have been higher. The whole of the future
of the science was going to be shaped by the outcome of the
debate, and a lot of careers and reputations were going to be
made or destroyed.
In the heat of the controversy, geology even became popular
with the public. As the Romantic era dawned, writers like
Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote magnificent hymns to the
beauty of the landscape. Coleridge especially was something of
a geology groupie. He corresponded with Erasmus Darwin on
Hutton's Theory of the Earth, and the British Library still
holds a copy of Hutton's Principles of Knowledge annotated by
Coleridge himself.
Meanwhile, a new generation was giving geology a more
practical bent. Roads and railways were crossing the continents,
and in the great new industrial cities factories sprouted like
mushrooms. All of this took resources. Giant quarries were
opened to yield building stone and lime for cement, and metal
ores and sources of fossil fuel were in great demand.
For the time being, the origin of the Earth was a lot less
important than a decent map of what lay underfoot. This was
the first great project of the Geological Society, founded in
2,00 AGES IN CHAOS

London in 1807 with a self-proclaimed mission to focus on

fact-gathering.
How could such a map be made? Britain's strata are notori­
ously folded and fragmented - 'topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped
and curled', as Byron said. The answer occurred to the English
canal surveyor William Smith.
Smith, born in 1769, was the orphaned son of a blacksmith
from a village in Oxfordshire. In 1792 he had descended into
mines in the county of Somerset. He was struck by the orderly
layering of the strata through which he passed - and he
was surprised by an unconformity every bit as startling as
Siccar Point, though buried under the ground. Smith wasn't
concerned about how the strata had got there. What mattered
to him was that the basic principle of geological superposition
- that younger rocks overlay older ones - could be the basis for
some kind of map of the geological treasures to be found in the
Earth.
To make such a map, you would have to be sure of the
relative ages of your strata, which isn't always easy: minerals
are minerals, whenever they are formed. If you want to date a
rock, there is one rigid requirement: you need something about
the rock that changes in a recognisable and irreversible way, so
that each sample is left with a unique time-stamp. And Smith
found his time-stamp in fossils. The different strata, no matter
how similar in their basic rock types, always contained
different fossil fauna, and that was how you could tell them
apart.
Smith's final publication was in 1815, with a tremendous
and magnificent map of England and Wales, almost three
metres high by two wide. A copy of Smith's great work still
hangs today in Burlington House, home of London's Geological
Society. The familiar outline of the country is filled in with
swirls and dapples of colour, blue, grey, yellow, orange, red,
umber. A great orange sweep from the Severn estuary across
the country towards the Humber shows a belt of Jurassic
limestone, and a vast semi-circle of grey in the south-east is
the Cretaceous chalk. It is as if the country has been flayed of
its people, cities, roads and greenery, to expose the underlying
rocky bones.
Smith, the Oxfordshire yeoman, suffered from many financial
 UPLIFT 201

difficulties, and from snobbery. He suspected that the leisured

gentlemen of the nascent Geological Society had plagiarised
his map to produce their own inferior version (and so they had,
shamefully undercutting Smith's price and driving him to
debtors' prison). Later in life, Smith's achievement was amply
recognised and rewarded by the British geological establish­
ment, and his maps were the prototype of modern geological
maps.
Hutton himself had realised the potential usefulness of a
map of geological outcrops. In about 1770, he offered to make
one of Scotland for his fellow geologist John Strange, and he
had asked Watt to make one of Cornwall for him. (Hutton was
not the first to conceive the idea - one Martin Lister had
floated the notion as early as 1683.) As noted earlier, Hutton,
conditioned by Scotland's ruined strata, never thought of using
the sequence of strata to map geological time, and had never
spotted the history implicit in the fossil-laden rocks.
As such maps were compiled, it quickly became obvious
that the simple Wernerian division of the strata just wasn't
adequate to describe the reality of the rocks. The Huttonians
smelt blood.

From 1811, Playfair began to publish commentaries in

magazines like The Edinburgh Review, leaning heavily on the
results of the new stratigraphy, in a concerted effort to bring
Hutton to the attention of a wider public.
Meanwhile, Sir James Hall gave the Royal Society of Edinburgh
a spectacular demonstration of how strata could be folded up,
just as Hutton predicted. He piled up layers of cloth on a table
and weighted them down with an old wooden door and heavy
weights. The cloth represented his strata, the weights the layers
of rock over them. Hall set two vertical boards at the ends of the
pile, and moved the boards towards each other by hammering
them with a mallet - thus representing the great mechanical
forces working within the Earth. The weighted door was raised
up, and the cloth developed folds which resembled distorted
strata of greywacke to be seen in Berwickshire and elsewhere.
Hall, ever the practical man, even went on to build an automatic
strata-folding machine.
By 1815, as Napoleon began his final exile, there had been a
202 AGES IN CHAOS

string of published reports more or less favourable to Hutton,

and no replies of substance. Explorations of the volcanic island
of Iceland showed the workings of Hutton's inner heat.
Evidence for the igneous nature of basalt, granite and the fest
continued to accumulate - and so did more direct evidence of
the inner heat: from the rising temperatures observed if you
went down a mine, for example.
The Wernerians at last began to lose ground. There was no
decisive moment, no Eureka. As late as 1813, the Reverend
Joseph Townsend launched a fierce attack on Hutton's religious
position, in a book uncompromisingly entitled The Character
of Moses Established for Veracity as an Historian, Recording
Events from the Creation to the Deluge. Who was the better
historian - Moses, who had spoken to God, or James Hutton,
who only had rocks to consult? But the case was being made.
By now, though, Hutton's generation were fading into the
shadows.
Playfair decided to produce a second edition of his
Illustrations, in order to reinforce Hutton with new observa­
tions. While the war with France continued, Playfair travelled
around Britain, and visited Ireland to see the Giant's
Causeway. In 1816, once the turmoil following Napoleon's
escape from Elba had passed, Playfair set off on a new round of
journeying in Europe. He made first for Paris, where he met
Cuvier and others. Then he visited the Swiss Alps to inspect
the strange erratic boulders there. He correctly concluded that
only glaciers could have transported such monsters. He stayed
the winter in Rome, then moved on to Naples, where he saw
Vesuvius in eruption. He crossed the Alps again, undertook
two weeks of mountaineering near Lucerne, and visited the
Auvergne district, with its extinct craters, basalt flows and
domed hills.
It was already nearly twenty years since Hutton had died.
Playfair was sixty-seven: it was too much, and he was
exhausted. By the end he was making only sparse notes. He
returned home. He never gathered the energy to produce his
second edition of the Illustrations. He died less than two years
later, in 1819.
Though as ever only a diffident advocate of Hutton's theories,
Sir James Hall continued his careful experimentation, and his
 UPLIFT 203

subtle support of his friend's legacy. In 1824, aged sixty-three,

Hall accompanied yet another keen young geologist on a
repeat of Hutton's classic expedition to Siccar Point. The
youngster was much impressed - and, a quarter of a century
after Hutton's death, it was to him that the responsibility for
the next stage of the argument would devolve.
His name was Charles Lyell.
 20
‘It altered the tone of one's mind'

What was most important about Charles Lyell was that, unlike
most of Hutton's contemporaries, he got Hutton's point about
uniformitarianism. But Lyell applied Hutton's great idea with a
ruthless severity that even Hutton would not have recognised.
In the past, said Lyell, Earth had always looked much as it
looks now. The climate changed, of course, but that was caused
by a shifting arrangement of land and sea, and followed great
cycles. Everything concerning plant and animal life was deter­
mined: similar conditions recurring in the future would give
rise to exactly the same species as in the past. For now, the
northern hemisphere was in 'the winter of the "Great Year" ',
but one day the long summer would return, restoring vanished
exotica with it: 'Then might those genera of animals return, of
which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our
continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods,
and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit
again through the umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.'
It was an astonishing, beautiful idea - and it was ferociously
argued. To Lyell this was more than just science: he believed
he was immersed in nothing less than an intellectual war.

After the death of Werner, Georges Cuvier, born a quarter of a

century after Hutton, had become the most famous geological
figure in Europe. Even during Napoleon's wars, Cuvier
explored the rocks of the Paris basin, mapping the strata of
that great bed of chalk. His central discovery (independently
made by William Smith in England) was that different strata
contained different assemblages of animals, which could
therefore be used to date those strata.
Cuvier's thinking was deeper than that of Smith the map­
maker. He tried to reconstruct what he could of the vanished
animals by comparing their fragmentary remains to the bones
of living creatures. He was able to demonstrate that many
 UPLIFT 205
animals to be found in the strata - like mammoths, Irish elk
and woolly rhinos - had no modern counterparts. With such
careful analyses, Cuvier proved the reality of extinction.
However, the assemblages of life forms in the different strata
did not give way to each other in an orderly way. Rather, there
seemed to be sharp cut-offs. The changes were so precisely
defined that Cuvier decided they must have been caused by
violent and sudden catastrophes. He speculated that what had
drowned the great Parisian menagerie might have been Noah's
Flood itself.
Today we recognise several 'mass extinctions' in the fossil
record - perhaps as many as eighteen. We're pretty sure that
the great killing sixty-five million years ago followed the
impact of a comet, a global spasm that ended the reign of the
dinosaurs. The greatest death of all was a cataclysm 250
million years deep, when nearly everything was lost. We still
don't know what caused it.
Cuvier's ideas resonated in the public mind. Europe was
emerging from the Napoleonic era, a time of abrupt changes
and devastating destruction. Perhaps the public were more
ready for a geological tale that was a better metaphor for their
own experiences than the slow creep of Hutton's uniform
processes.
However, Cuvier's 'confirmation' of Noah's Flood, coming
from such an esteemed authority, was meat and drink to that
dwindling but vocal band of geologists who still hoped that
geology could verify the Bible. Even that fickle Huttonian Sir
James Hall speculated that a sudden uplift at the bottom of the
sea might have caused the Deluge. In his characteristically
practical style, Hall started setting off gunpowder explosions
underwater to see if he could make a scale-model tsunami.
Charles Lyell was appalled by this revival of scriptural geology.
Softly spoken and reserved in manner, Lyell was born in
Scotland a few months after Hutton's death in 1797. At the
insistence of his father Lyell studied law. But during a summer
vacation from his studies at Oxford, young Lyell read a copy of
Robert Bakewell's Introduction to Geology - stridently anti-
Wernerian and emphasising the immensity of time. Lyell had
been a naturalist - butterflies and beetles - but soon geology
was competing with his law studies.
206 AGES IN CHAOS

Even by his mid-twenties,' Lyell's own ideas had been

starting to emerge. He had an aesthetic preference, he told
friends, for 'the agency of known causes'. There was Deist
thinking in his own background: the nature of God was to* be
inferred from the study of nature's order. Then, in 1828, Lyell
visited Italy, Sicily and France. At the bay of Naples, he was
very struck by the Temple of Jupiter Serapis, of which three
columns remained upright. Each of the columns had been
eaten into at a high level by marine bivalves. So the columns
must have been lowered into the sea - and then raised again,
through several metres, in historic times. Not only that, these
great movements had been so gentle that some of the temple's
thin columns had survived without being toppled over:
gradual, uniform processes, working evenly through time.
Lyell became convinced that Hutton's explanations were on
the right lines. The latter-day catastrophists had to be defeated
if geology was to emerge, after all, as an orderly science that
would not have shamed Newton. And that was what Lyell
determined to do.
He published the first volume of the book that would become
his masterpiece in 1830. From the very start, it was one long
argument to support the cause of uniformitarianism (though
that word would be coined by a rival two years later). Even the
title could not have been more explicit - Principles of Geology:
Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the
Earth’s Surface by Causes Now in Operation. To acknowledge
Hutton's priority Lyell opened his work with a quotation from
Playfair, but he admitted that he knew little of Hutton's work
directly: 'Though I tried, I doubt whether I ever read more than
half [Hutton's] writings, and skimmed the rest.'
Lyell's uniformitarianism was taken to a fanatical degree. He
insisted that every past event had to be explained by causes
now operating: there was nothing in the past that we cannot
see in the world around us now. Causes, wrote Lyell, had always
worked at about the same rate as they do now. Any disasters,
like floods or volcanoes, only had local effects: there had been
no global mishaps. He believed Cuvier's sudden transitions in
the fossil beds were just artefacts of a poor record. The rocky
narrative was like a book of which 'only here and there a short
chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and
 UPLIFT 207

there a few lines'.

Perhaps Lyell's powerful arguments were necessary to rid
geology of floods and other Biblical hangovers, but his
propagandising would lead to an unfair caricaturing of his
opponents. Cuvier, for example, was no prisoner of theology,- it
was just that when he looked at the rocks, unlike Lyell, he saw
an unmistakable record of cataclysm.
Lyell's work was a great success, and hugely influential. It
was much admired for its discipline and sense of rigour, and
did a great deal to establish geology on orderly foundations,
and to promote Hutton's essential arguments.
In the end, though, Lyell's uniformitarianism would prove
too strict a model for the messy realities of the rocks. Evidence
continued to turn up, like the great U-shaped valleys of north
Britain, that surely could not be explained away by Lyell's
slow-acting processes, no matter how long they were given to
work.
The tension continued until the late 1830s, when Louis
Agassiz presented a new theory: not water, but ice. The
geologists quickly realised that many anomalous features of
northern Europe, like the flat-bottomed valleys and the erratic
boulders, had been shaped by the action of ice, not water. The
idea of an Ice Age was born.
Agassiz was actually a fan of Lyell, and praised his Principles
as the most important work on geology to date. Lyell, on the
other hand, had a great deal of trouble with Agassiz's theories.
Agassiz was a catastrophist, and therefore an obstacle to Lyell's
great project. It took Lyell until 1858 before he finally accepted
Agassiz's glaciations.
In the end, though, it would not be rocks or ice but living
creatures that would present Lyell with the greatest challenge
of his intellectual life.

In 1831 - a year after the publication of Lyell's Principles -

Charles Darwin, aged twenty-two, was preparing for an
extraordinary voyage on a survey ship called the HMS Beagle.
And the young Darwin took with him on the Beagle a copy of
Lyell's newly minted Principles.
Darwin would later admit that before opening Principles he
knew nothing of geology: 'As far as I know everyone has yet
2O8 AGES IN CHAOS

thought that the six thousand odd years [of Ussher] has been
the right period/ he would write to his sister. When he read
Lyell, he was drawn to the central truth of the Huttonian view.
The clincher was his experience of an earthquake in Chile,
when he actually witnessed uplift: on one island the Beagle
crew saw rotting mussels stranded on rocks three metres
above the high-water mark.
Darwin was able to see a major gap in Lyell's argument,
however. The creation of species was the point where Lyell's
application of uniform natural laws broke down. Darwin said,
'We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole
systems of universes to be governed by laws, but the smallest
insect, we want to be created by special act.'
Darwin marvelled at what he found in the tropics - 'The
land is one great wild, untidy luxuriant hothouse, made by
nature for herself' - and he came home with the raw material
and insights whose analysis would occupy the rest of his life.
On his return Darwin settled in London, not far from Lyell's
home. The two became friends, and Lyell helped Darwin's
election to the Geological Society. Much later, Lyell would
help Darwin with the 'delicate arrangement' that had to be
worked out when Alfred Wallace, working independently,
almost published a theory of evolution that would have
trumped Darwin.
Over the following decades, Darwin used his Beagle data -
and such input as Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of
Population - to establish his theory of natural selection: with
variation from one generation to the next, followed by a
relentless and lethal pruning by competition and predation,
life and death worked together to shape species. Darwin had
found a way in which a species could be shaped to fit its
environment - not by divine intervention, not by mind, but
through the steady, relentless working of natural law. Just like
the Huttonian prescription for the Earth, it was a Newtonian
scheme for life. For better or worse, Darwin transformed our
view of our place in the universe. Humans too are not the out­
come of a divine design, but simply products of the relentless
workings of natural laws, just like rivers and mountains,
beetles and whales.
For evolution to work, Darwin saw, he needed time: lots of
 UPLIFT 209
it, time enough for the slow working of natural selection to
turn a handful of windblown finches into the finely adapted
varieties he had seen on Galapagos - time to turn a thing like
a dog into a whale, an ape into a human.
Darwin's Origin of Species was dedicated to, among others,
Charles Lyell. 'The great merit of [Lyell's] Principles,' he wrote,
'was that it altered the tone of one's mind.' Darwin knew little
or nothing of Hutton: by Darwin's time, his work thoroughly
assimilated and reworked by Lyell and others, Hutton had
already become a figure of history. It was thanks to Hutton,
however, that Darwin had time in abundance.
In 1856, when Darwin first showed his ideas to Lyell, the great
geologist wasn't enthused. By now, Lyell had been defending his
strict uniformitarianism for the best part of three decades. For a
long time, it had been apparent that his extension of uniformity
to living things was the shakiest of his tenets,- the rocks showed
that life was not static or recurring, as Lyell predicted with his
flitting pterodactyls, but in some sense progressive: there were
creatures in the rocks who had not recovered from their
extinction. At fifty-nine, it isn't so easy to give up beliefs that
have been cherished for a lifetime. However, Lyell could no
longer defend his position, and he was forced to accept
Darwin's natural selection.
But Lyell wasn't the only one with doubts about Darwin's
synthesis - and still, six decades after his death, Hutton's ideas
were to be challenged.

There is a 'Kelvin Room' at the home of the Royal Society of

Edinburgh. It is decorated in a gaudy red flock wallpaper that
reminds the Society's staff of an Indian restaurant. It contains
a rather magnificent collage photograph of all the Fellows of
the Society in 1902, arrayed as if they were brought together in
a lecture room, like an intellectually weighty version of the
Beatles' Sergeant Pepper cover. And there, front and centre,
is Lord Kelvin himself, aged seventy-six, scowling like a
particularly ferocious Old Testament prophet.
Lord Kelvin - born William Thomson - was the most formid­
able physicist of his generation. His name is remembered
today for the Kelvin scale of temperature: absolute zero is the
zero of his scale. And well might he scowl, for Kelvin hated
210 AGES IN CHAOS

evolution, finding Darwin's cold mechanical processes

repugnant.
In December i860, aged a mere thirty-six and laid up with a
bad leg (broken in a curling accident), Kelvin, brooding on-the
origin of species, came up with a way to starve Darwin of the
one resource his theory couldn't do without: Hutton's deep
time.
How did the sun shine? It had been thought that it must be
powered by a chemical burning - perhaps it was just a ball of
coal. But Kelvin himself had shown that coal would burn out
in a few thousand years.
Perhaps, it was proposed, the source of the sun's heat was
gravity. The sun was held to be contracting. If you drop a rock
down a mineshaft, gravitational energy is released, which
shatters the rock and creates heat and noise. In the same way,
the sun's infalling layers would release energy, converted to
heat and light. But this couldn't last for ever. 'Within a finite
period of time past,' Kelvin wrote, 'the Earth must have been
and within a finite period of time to come must again be unfit
for the habitation of man as at present constituted.' Kelvin's
first calculation indicated that gravitational infall could keep
the sun shining for a total lifetime of perhaps a hundred
million years.
This is a long time - but Kelvin's results contradicted the
sorts of dates the geologists and biologists were coming up
with. Darwin himself had quoted over twenty kilometres as
the total depth of British sedimentary rock: if present processes
really were the key to the past, to have built up such a
monstrous thickness must mean the past had to be long indeed.
Just as Ussher's handful of millennia had in the end proved too
constrictive, so now there just wasn't enough time even in
Kelvin's hundred million years.
Darwin didn't have the physics or mathematics to counter
Kelvin. But Kelvin's rapidly dying universe depressed him:
'Even personal annihilation sinks in my mind into
insignificance compared with ... the certainty of the sun some
day cooling & we all freezing. To think of the progress of
millions of years, with every continent swarming with good &.
enlightened men all ending in this.' Still, Darwin went to his
death convinced that the world would eventually be found to
 UPLIFT 2,11
be 'rather older than Kelvin makes it'.
The crucial discoveries that would resolve this impasse were
unassuming - even accidental.
By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists had grown
puzzled by the phenomenon of phosphorescence: the way
uranium salt crystals, for example, glowed in the dark. There
had to be a new energy source within the uranium salt itself.
By 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie had labelled this new energy
radioactivity, and went on to show that a gram of radium could
raise its own mass of water from freezing to boiling in an hour.
Suddenly, there was a new energy source to power the sun.
The Earth, too, is heated continually by the disintegration of
radioactive atoms in its interior. In 1903, the New Zealand
physicist Ernest Rutherford was prepared to go public with the
implications: 'The discovery of the radioactive elements ...
thus increases the possible limit of the duration of life on this
planet, and allows the time claimed by the geologist and
biologist for the process of evolution.'
Kelvin himself was too old to back down: he was a great
man, but he was stubborn. He always insisted that 'heavier
than air flying machines are impossible' - though he died in
1907, four years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

Kelvin had at least made a start in applying quantitative

physical principles to the absolute determination of Earth's
age. Geological methods like stratigraphy could only tell you
that one rock was older than another. To be able to work out
how old a rock was in actual years was an extraordinarily
exciting idea.
In studying the new radioactive materials, Rutherford
quickly came to see that the way they decayed might lead to a
new method for reaching Earth's deep past. The radioactivity
of a material like uranium depended on the break-up of the
nuclei of its atoms to give the nuclei of 'daughter products',
such as helium or lead. But that meant, Rutherford saw, that if
you had a sample of rock containing uranium ore, you could
tell how old the rock was by comparing the proportion of the
element itself to the daughter products.
Even Rutherford's first crude results were remarkable. The
very first sample of pitchblende he tested showed an age of
212 AGES IN CHAOS

seven hundred million years, seven times Kelvin's notional age

of the Earth. Rutherford's'pioneering work was carried on by a
young Englishman called Arthur Holmes, a physicist who had
switched to geology. Holmes began a programme of extremely
precise work which, by the 1930s, had pushed the minimum
age of the Earth up into the billions of years.
The twentieth-century work on radioactivity provided a
startling demonstration of Hutton's uniformitarianism. Even
from the most ancient samples, the physicists produce
devastatingly regular straight-line graphs - called 'isochrons' -
which show beyond dispute the relentless and unchanging
nature of the rate of radioactive decay. While these bits of rock
were buried in the Earth, civilisations rose and fell, mountain
ranges bloomed and disappeared like smoke. But to the rocks
nothing mattered but the steady transformation of parent
element to daughter, a steady nuclear ticking that continued
unvarying and unperturbed, perhaps across billions of years.
But how old is Earth itself? Ours is an active planet; few
rocks are left undisturbed for long. To determine the Earth's
true age, what was needed was a piece of primordial material -
the stuff of which Earth had been made in the first place.
American physicist Clair Patterson worked on the Manhattan
Project of the Second World War, and would agonise for the
rest of his life over the morality of the atomic bomb. To fix the
age of the Earth, Patterson's academic supervisor suggested
dating meteorites - bits of the primordial cloud from which
the planets had formed, untouched through aeons until they
fell to Earth. The procedure would be 'duck soup', said the super­
visor. It turned out to be anything but. It took seven years before
Patterson was confident that he had isolated his meteorite
samples from lead contamination in Earth's environment. The
level of contamination shocked him, and later in life Patterson
would be instrumental in getting the USA's Clean Air Act on
to the statute books.
Patterson finally succeeded in deriving a new date for the
Earth: 4.55 billion years, give or take a few tens of millions of
years. This date, published in 1956, has survived the half-
century of study and confirmation since.
All the continents have ancient rocks: Asia, South America
and Africa have all yielded samples more than 3.5 billion years
 UPLIFT 213
old, while the oldest on the North American continent, from
Canada's Slave Province, is more than four billion years old.
Perhaps the most astonishing rocks of all come from the
Yilgarn Block in Western Australia. In January 2001 it was
reported that a Yilgarn fragment had yielded a date of 4.4
billion years - just a hundred million years after the formation
of Earth itself.
And the Yilgarn sample had crystallised from magma in
contact with liquid water, and was embedded in quartzite,
metamorphosed sandstone. Even on such a young Earth there
were oceans, and on their shallow beds sediments gathered:
then, as now.
Two centuries after Hutton's death, the triumph of deep
time is complete.
 21
'The bold outline traced with
so masterly a hand’
Playfair, presciently, had understood how future generations
would have to build on Hutton's theory. Previous thinkers,
from Aristotle to Burnet, had tended to present their theories
as unique, if not God-given inspirations; if they discussed their
predecessors at all, it was only to dismiss them. But by 1800 a
new idea had emerged: that human knowledge itself could
evolve. A proposal like Hutton's was not a finished article, but
could be taken up by a new generation, reworked and reshaped,
corrected and modified, in the continuing search for a better
understanding of the world. Playfair wrote, 'Ages may be
required to fill up the bold outline which Dr Hutton has traced
with so masterly a hand; to detach the parts more completely
from the general mass; to adjust the size and position of the
subordinate members; and to give to the whole piece the exact
proportion and true colouring of nature.'
It has taken two centuries, and the overcoming of much
intellectual resistance, but as Playfair hoped, James Hutton's
'bold outline' has indeed been completed and extended by later
generations of workers, from Lyell to the present day. But it is
all still founded on Hutton's basic insights.

Take the rock cycle, for instance. Hutton was the first to
propose the constant exchange of material between Earth's
surface and its interior.
At the surface of the Earth, weathering is relentless - just as
Hutton observed - and even the hardest rock will, with time,
erode away. The weathering can be chemical, as limestone is
dissolved away by acid rainwater, or physical, as ice or salt
crystals forming in cracks shatter rock surfaces. Even heat
swings can fracture rocks: Hannibal used fire to break boulders
on his way across the Alps.
As Hutton understood, a key product of weathering is soil.
 UPLIFT 215
Soil, composed of rock fragments and of decaying organic matter,
is itself a complex system, embedded in the greater interacting
systems of the Earth. Unlike Hutton, though, modern scientists
would never describe the process of its creation as intentionally
designed.
As weathering breaks down Earth's surface, the land is
denuded through winds, rock falls and landslides, and through
the action of rivers, tides and glaciers. Every year, some twenty
thousand million tonnes of material are transported -
passengers of water, wind or ice. All this debris is eventually
deposited somewhere. A river will drop its heavier rocks and
pebbles quickly, and when it reaches the ocean, coarser sands
settle out close to the river mouth, then finer silts and clays
are carried further out to sea. Thus as the land is constantly
lowered, the sea bed gets ever thicker.
Hutton proposed that temperature and pressure, from the
weight of overlying layers, combine to fuse this debris into
rock. Mud and clay will turn to shale, sand to sandstone,
gravel to conglomerate. Today we know that chemical action
is also important. Under the weight of overlying layers, the
mineral grains of a sediment are crushed together. As water is
squeezed out, chemicals dissolved in it - calcite, quartz or iron
oxides - can be deposited as cement to bind the grains
together. Or the cementation can be caused simply by physical
pressure,- at points of contact the grains dissolve, and when
they recrystallise they are locked together.
Organic matter can also be the source of sedimentary rocks.
In the oceans, millions of microscopic creatures build their
bodies from calcium carbonate dissolved in the sea water.
When they die, they settle to the ocean floor, taking with them
the minerals locked in their tiny bodies: chalk is four-fifths
calcium carbonate. Coal is a special kind of sedimentary rock,
formed from the remains of trees and other plants, laid down
in stagnant lakes or swamps where the processes of decay are
arrested.
Hutton was essentially right, too, that the internal heat
engine of the Earth can drive the uplift of rocks.
We now know that tectonic movements, the collision of
continents floating on great magmatic currents in the mantle,
can thrust rocks up from deep inside the Earth's crust and pile
2l6 AGES IN CHAOS

them into mountains - the most spectacular examples today

are the Himalayas and thé Alps - which immediately begin to
be eroded away in their turn. In this vast chthonic churning,
rocks are dragged down into the ferocious cauldron of Earth's
mantle, where they are melted and made anew. We can recon­
struct these journeys using, in part, the experimental geology
pioneered by Sir James Hall. In the Kokchetav Massif of
Kazakhstan can be found metamorphic rocks containing
micro-diamonds, formed from marine sediments probably
transported more than a hundred kilometres deep, deeper even
than the granite roots of mountains. And the isotopic composi­
tion of some basalts from Hawaii prove that they came from
bits of ocean crust that had been carried nearly half way down
into the Earth's interior, and exhumed once more. Just as
Hutton wrote in his 1785 Abstract, 'The bottom of the ocean
is to be made to change its place with relation to the centre of
the Earth.'
James Hutton was the first to recognise the central
importance of heat in the formation and operation of the
Earth's features. He was the first to understand the importance
of erosion, consolidation and uplift, and the interconnection of
Earth's surface and underground forces. Hutton was the first to
insist on the basic orderliness and constancy of geological
processes through time: his uniformitarianism was the
essential foundation of the orderly thinking that has remained
the basis of geology ever since - even though, as geologists
have learned of such processes as tectonic drift, glaciations and
extraterrestrial impacts, they have had to develop their theories
to incorporate catastrophic events. Today the debate is focused
on the relative importance of fast and slow processes over
geological time.
There have been many great geologists, but no figure before or
since bequeathed a package of so many profound and integrated
insights as James Hutton. And he was the first to construct a
model of Earth's history containing its most essential feature: a
vast and deep abyss of time.
But - to quote Stephen Jay Gould - though Hutton was a
great thinker, he was not a modern thinker. And he has been
hugely misunderstood.
★
 UPLIFT 217
Since his death, a heroic mythology has grown up around
Hutton. This view has it that he was a fully modern scientist,
proceeding by observation and fieldwork to deduction.
Lyell invented this Hutton as an ally in his war against the
catastrophists, but it was Sir Archibald Geikie who cemented
Hutton into the pantheon of progressive modern scientists.
Geikie was himself a distinguished geologist and director-
general of the British Geological Survey, who did much to
revive the tradition of Scottish geology, which had foundered
somewhat after Hutton's generation. In 1897, Geikie claimed
that Hutton 'went far afield in search of facts ... For about
thirty years, he never ceased to study the natural history of the
globe ... In the whole of Hutton's doctrine, he vigorously
guarded himself against the admission of any principle which
could not be founded on observation. He made no assump­
tions. Every step in his deductions was based upon actual fact.'
And so on.
The facts don't bear out this myth. Hutton clearly was a
keen observer of the geological world. He spent thirty years
studying formations and collecting specimens, and towards
the end of his career he could read the land well enough to let
it lead him straight to the kind of features he hoped to find. But
still, his 1785 presentation had preceded the crucial evidence
he needed: before 1785 he had seen only one unconvincing
granite sample, and he had certainly seen no unconformities
with the clarity of Jedburgh or Siccar Point.
And, like all of us, Hutton was a man of his time, immersed
in his culture. In addition to 'scientific' logic and observation,
his thinking was a rich mixture of metaphor and analogy and
flights of fancy, much of which helped guide and shape his
geology.
Some of Hutton's ideas, dismissed by subsequent generations,
have resonance today.
Take his belief that the Earth was a kind of machine, a
'Living World', designed to sustain life. The 'Great Chain of
Being' idea was commonplace in Hutton's day, but in later
rationalist times it fell out of favour. As late as 1947, the
commentator S. I. Tomkeieff, remarking on Hutton's geological
philosophy, wrote that Hutton's imagery was an example of
'extreme and rather crude pictures of the Earth as a sort of
2l8 AGES IN CHAOS

superorganism [which] now seem fantastic7'. Times change: now

we can recognise that Hutton's deep intuition was actually a
remarkable foreshadowing of another modern idea.
Today we understand that the Earth's surface - that is,*its
crust, the atmosphere, the water in the oceans and rivers and
suspended in the air, and the biosphere, the world's great cargo
of living things - is indeed a complex, interconnected system,
constantly in flux under pressure of powerful forces. The two
main driving mechanisms are the sun's radiant energy, which
drives wind, rain and the other agents that attack and erode
the Earth's surface, and Earth's internal engine, principally the
movement of the great tectonic plates as driven by mantle
convection currents, which create land relief by uplifting and
buckling the land, as well as causing earthquakes and
volcanoes. Just as Hutton intuited, these two forces are in a
kind of balance, maintaining cycles of material.
And these tremendous cycles keep Earth habitable.
The astrophysicists have long wrestled with the 'Young Sun
Paradox'. The sun, like all similar stars, is slowly brightening
as it ages,- in Earth's early history its power output was only
some seventy per cent of its current value. But as far back as we
can see, conditions on Earth have been equable. Yes, there have
been intervals of glaciation, but on the whole, liquid water has
been able to exist on Earth's surface for almost all of its history.
Faced with a relentlessly brightening sun, some mechanism
seems to have maintained the mean surface temperature of
Earth in a range suitable for liquid water - in fact, for life.
The key turns out to be carbon dioxide, the notorious 'green­
house gas' causing our current pulse of global warming: in the
past it worked to trap the sun's heat, just as it does now.
Carbon dioxide is injected into the air by outgassing from
volcanoes and other tectonic phenomena, as well as from
human industry. It is removed by weathering, as the gas
combines chemically with surface rocks and so is drawn out of
the atmosphere. The outgassing is more or less constant, but
the weathering rate changes with temperature: it increases
when the air heats up. So there is a feedback mechanism
operating here, with the carbon dioxide concentration adjust­
ing to the climate conditions, resulting in a 'homeostasis', a
stable condition.
 UPLIFT 219
All this is just inanimate chemistry. But in the process of
photosynthesis, plants ingest carbon dioxide - so the level of
carbon dioxide in the air is intimately linked with life.
This, and a number of other biochemical and geochemical
feedback cycles, led fames Lovelock to formulate his 'Gaia
hypothesis', proposing that life on a planetary scale has the
ability actively to control its environment, rather than passively
coping with changes. Lovelock's ideas were greeted by a pre­
dictable storm, but the records of the evenness of temperatures
in the past, and similar data, seem unarguable.
Just as Hutton saw, our Earth is a 'living world' that, through
its great cycles, has maintained conditions of equilibrium on
its surface for billions of years, and will continue to do so for a
long time to come. There is surely no mind involved, no
intention. But to understand life - ourselves, and our future as
part of the biosphere - we need generous and holistic thinking;
we need to welcome back the spirit of Hutton's Enlightenment.

If Hutton were working today, the most controversial aspect of

his theorising would certainly be his use of design arguments:
his belief that the world is the way it is because God intended
it so. But again, these ideas have a resonance today.
To many thinkers of Hutton's generation, the exquisite
perfection of the living world seemed clear evidence of the
work of God. 'Suppose I found a watch upon the ground,' wrote
the theologian William Paley in 1802, 'and it should be
inquired how the watch happened to be in that place ... When
we come to inspect the watch, we perceive ... that its several
parts are framed and out together for a purpose' (my emphasis).
How could such an intricate thing as an eye or a wing have
emerged from natural processes - how could it exist without a
designing mind behind it?
Hutton actually did consider the hypothesis that it might
have been chance that created the Earth and its cargo of life
forms - that Paley's watch might indeed have emerged by
sheer random luck. 'Was it the work of accident, or effect of
occasional transaction, that by which the sea had covered our
land? Or, was it the intention of that Mind which formed the
matter of the globe, which imbued that matter with its active
and its passive powers, and which placed it with so much
220 AGES IN CHAOS

wisdom among a numberless collection of bodies, all moving

in a system?' It was surely more intellectually satisfying to
believe that a Mind had created the exquisite order Hutton
observed all around him. And after all, when Hutton was alive,
nobody had any coherent alternative explanation: it was God,
of one stripe or another, or nothing.
It would take Charles Darwin, a generation later, to show
that randomness, through natural selection, could indeed
produce the complexity of a living world, without the need for
a Mind, divine or otherwise. In modern times Richard Dawkins
has been prepared to put this even more bluntly: 'The universe
we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.' This is at once the
beauty and the terror of our new world view, and perhaps it is
no surprise that many find it difficult to come to terms with
such a cold vision.
Remarkably, however, design principles have made a
comeback in recent years, in a rather different form.
It has become apparent that it required a long chain of
cosmic coincidences to produce a universe, a world, in
which creatures like us can exist to view it. For example, our
biochemistry is based on carbon. But at one time there was no
carbon in the universe. Only hydrogen and helium, and traces
of other light elements, emerged from the Big Bang. The
heavier elements, including carbon, were cooked in stars, and
then scattered in supernova explosions, to become available
for making cells and bones, wings and eyes and people.
But the formation of carbon in stars, by a complex chain of
fusion processes, depends on a precise coordination between
different physical constants that, if it were even slightly off,
would fail. It is as if the universe has been fine-tuned to
produce us (or at least carbon!). The strings of 'coincidences'
required to produce us are so long that some have been
tempted to speculate there may be a purpose to it all. Fred
Hoyle - the British astrophysicist who unravelled the produc­
tion of carbon in stars - said in 1959, 'I do not believe that any
scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the
inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately
designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside
 UPLIFT 221

the stars' (my emphasis).

Other thinkers, including physicists Frank Tipler and John
Barrow, have gone further, and developed this modern design-
oriented thinking into a 'cosmological anthropic principle',
exploring the possibilities that the universe was in some sense
designed to produce human beings. Or perhaps the universe
has itself been shaped by evolution, the product of natural
selection among some meta-cosmic population.
My point here is not to say that design arguments, for
example, are right or wrong - though I certainly don't condone
their misuse by modern creationists. But as Hoyle, Tipler and
Barrow show, such ideas can be fruitful and suggestive of
further research - just as Harvey's belief about a design in the
blood's circulation system led to a prediction about the
existence of capillaries, and Hutton's design arguments about
Earth's replenishment led him to look for, and eventually find,
a renewal mechanism in geological uplift.

Does it matter how Hutton came up with his ideas?

Yes, I believe it does. To understand how scientific and other
insights come about, we have to reconstruct the thinking of
figures like Hutton, as accurately as we can. After all, a new
paradigm can be constructed only by a thinker educated in the
old paradigm: you have to be wrong before you can be right.
And if we choose to inspect the past solely through the
prejudices of the present, we will fail fully to appreciate the
richness of human thought. We will lose other ways of think­
ing that, just like Hutton's ideas and metaphors, may have
much to offer us as we confront the new problems of today.
We will always need vision. The Princeton physicist Freeman
Dyson has looked even beyond the end of the Earth, to sketch
the far future of life in an expanding universe. Dyson's work was
based on the same thinking as Hutton's, that physical laws will
continue to work as we understand them into the indefinite
future: if the present is the key to the past, it is also the key
to the future. And 'no matter how far we go into the future,'
said Dyson, 'there will always be new things happening, new
information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly
expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.'
As James Hutton firmly believed, the future is full of hope.
 EPILOGUE

Hutton was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh, not far

from the grave of his friend Joseph Black. The Kirkyard is an
island of surprising peace, surrounded as it is by the bustle and
traffic of the Old Town. Hutton's grave was unmarked, and
nobody knows quite where it is, but in 1947, on the 150th
anniversary of Hutton's death, the Lord Provost unveiled a
plaque to 'James Hutton MD FRSE: Founder of Modern Geology'.
After Hutton's death it was quite a surprise to everyone
when James Hutton Junior - by then a man in his forties -
turned up in Edinburgh, seeking financial help. None of
Hutton's friends had known anything of James Jr's existence -
not even Black. But Black and Watt knew the mother, for Black
wrote to Watt that 'he is not like [Hutton] in the face, having
more the features of his mother.'
As Hutton had died unmarried and intestate - James Jr was
not a legitimate heir - his property passed to his only surviving
sister, Isabella. Isabella, a spinster herself, remained living in
the house on St John's Hill. In 1810, she sold the farm at
Slighhouses to one Charles Douglas, and on her death in 1821
she left Nether Monynut to Hutton's grandchildren by James
Jr: Edington, Margaret and Jane Smeaton Hutton. Two years
after that, the Smeaton Huttons sold the farm on for £1,580.
As for Hutton's house, that would survive until the 1960s,
when a disastrous programme of redevelopment obliterated
that part of Edinburgh. In 1997, conferences were held to
celebrate the bicentenaries of Hutton's death, and Lyell's birth.
To mark the occasion, money was raised by international
subscription to establish a kind of memorial garden at the site
of Hutton's house. The garden is unprepossessing, sandwiched
between a multi-storey car park and the ugly tenement blocks
that replaced the architecture of Hutton's era. But there is a
plaque, mounted on a bit of Triassic sandstone, bearing a
cartoon of Hutton and an inscription of his 'no vestige ... no
prospect' quotation, and there are boulders from Glen Tilt and
elsewhere. And the Salisbury Crags loom over it all, as they
 EPILOGUE 223
always did. Humans and their petty doings come and go, but
the geology endures.
James Davie, Hutton's partner in the sal ammoniac business,
died not long after Hutton himself. By now their manufactur­
ing process was becoming old-fashioned. The business seems
to have been quickly wound up, for soon after Davie's death
Edinburgh soot was being sent to a works in Yorkshire.
By 1800, when James Watt's partnership with Boulton ended
and the patent on the separate-condenser system expired, 451
machines had been built to Watt's designs. Britain's miners
were working up to three hundred metres deep, and the mines
produced a million tonnes of coal a year. Watt had turned the
steam engine from Newcomen's clanking and inefficient water
pump into a universal source of power for industry and
transport. Watt himself suffered indifferent health until his
death in 1819. In his old age he was honoured. His memorial
in Westminster Abbey acclaims him as 'among the most
illustrious followers of science and the real benefactors of the
world'.
Richard Kirwan too gathered more honours. Life President of
his precious Royal Irish Academy, he was also appointed
president of the Dublin Library Society and inspector-general
of His Majesty's Mines in Ireland, and he was elected to many
foreign academies including Berlin, Stockholm, and Philadelphia,
the capital of newly independent America. There was even a
Kirwanian Society of Dublin founded as a tribute to him and
to spread his ideas.
Kirwan himself became still more eccentric. He cultivated a
habit of patrolling the grounds of his estate with wolfhounds
and greyhounds: he had developed an attachment to large dogs,
since an Irish wolfhound had rescued him from an attack of six
wild boars. Sometimes he would be accompanied by a huge
eagle that would perch on his shoulder,- he had trained the
eagle himself and it had become devoted to him. One day, as it
swooped down towards Kirwan's shoulder, a friend thought
the eagle was going to attack him and shot it.
When Kirwan died in 1812, at the age of seventy-nine, his
personal copy of Hutton's Theory would be found with many
of its pages uncut. Richard Kirwan had become so obsessed
with Hutton's theories that he had written a whole book about
224 AGES IN CHAOS

them, but he hadn't bothered to read through Hutton's Theory:

Kirwan knew Hutton was wrong without even having to
check.
Sir James Hall died in 1832, aged seventy-one. He was buried
in the Dunglass Collegiate Church on his family's estate.
Today the Church is maintained as a monument; you can
find it easily by following the brown tourist-information signs
from the Al. The estate is a beautiful, open place, in harmony
with the rolling countryside, with a view of the sea that is
somewhat spoiled by the squat monolith of Torness. The Church
itself, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was completed in 1450. It
is a small, pretty sandstone building, with a massive square
tower at the centre, a vaulted choir and nave, and a stone slab
roof. It was successfully defended against Henry VIII's army in
1544, but in the seventeenth century it was converted into a
stable; its east wall was pulled down to let in the animals.
The south transept is the 'burial aisle' of the Halls. Carved
stone memorial plaques are set in the walls, and I spent a
happy morning sitting in the .transept reconstructing Hall's
family history, running from his father Sir John, born 1711, to
his grandson, died 1876. The family's story weaves in and out
of British history. Sir James Hall married Helen, who bore him
six children. His daughter Magdalene married a Colonel
William de Lancey who was killed at Waterloo, and one of
Hall's grandsons served in the siege of Sebastopol.
Sir James Hall's own plaque records that he was 'distinguished
among the eminent men of an enquiring age, not less by the
originality, boldness and accuracy of his speculations than by
the ingenuity and resolute perseverance with which he sub­
stantiated various important theoretical views in his favourite
science of geology by a series of brilliant and convincing
experimental researches.' Not a bad epitaph.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh has continued to flourish.
Hall was president from 1812 to 1820, and Playfair served as
general secretary from 1798 to 1819, during which period he
was described as 'the life and soul of that institution'. The
Society held its meetings in the cramped quarters of the
University Library until 1810, when it moved to a house in
George Street, and then in 1826 to the Royal Institution. But it
was only a tenant, and after eighty years it was startled to be
 EPILOGUE 225
ejected so that the Royal Institution could become an art
gallery. After much lobbying by Kelvin and others, Parliament
granted the Society a new home at its present residence in
George Street. There, a huge portrait of an elderly James Hall,
ferociously reading an unidentifiable book, looms over the
entrance lobby, and there is a plaster bust of Hutton himself,
in neo-classical mode.
A key purpose of the Society was always to provide an
opportunity for scientists and scholars of different specialisms
to mix. The clubbable Hutton, Smith, Ferguson, Black and
others hardly needed any encouragement, but a century later
'it was Kelvin moving eagerly on the soft carpet, and putting
his gyroscopes through their dynamical drill ... or Lister
quaffing a glass of milk which had stood for weeks under a
light stopper which no germs could creep through'.
Today, through such activities as lectures for schoolchildren
and seminars, the Society continues to pursue its goal of 'the
cultivation of every branch of science, erudition and taste'.
Among the Society's notable achievements was the 'Challenger'
expedition, a mighty oceanographic feat covering 1,000 days
and 69,000 nautical miles. But Hutton's 1788 paper on his
theory of the Earth is still listed as one of the top five published
by the Society in its history of more than two hundred years.
The Oyster Club, though, did not survive its founders.

On Hutton's death, Isabella gave his precious rock collection

to Joseph Black, who was by then old and infirm himself. So he
offered the collection to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on the
conditions that it be kept together as a Huttonian collection,
that trustees should be appointed, and that the specimens
should be properly labelled and catalogued.
The Society, under its Charter, had to deposit any collec­
tions where they could be made available to scholars and the
general public. In practice that meant Edinburgh University's
Museum of Natural History - where the specimens came into
the care of the Reverend John Walker, professor of natural
history. From the time of Hutton's 1785 presentation, Walker
had been vehemently opposed to Hutton the system-builder.
Not only that, Walker would soon be succeeded in his post by
his nephew Robert Jameson, Werner's most influential British
226 AGES IN CHAOS

follower. In summer 1797, four months after Hutton's death,

Jameson visited Kirwan in Dublin.
Jameson was a young man who had inherited a museum left
in a muddle by an ailing Walker, and it may be that he failed
to understand how Hutton had used his 'hand specimens' to
establish his arguments, and therefore simply failed to grasp
the importance of the collection - but it's hard to avoid the
conclusion that he was motivated by a Wernerian prejudice.
Jameson didn't even try to catalogue the collection. He
wouldn't display it to the public, or even to the Fellows of the
Royal Society. When Playfair and two other trustees finally
forced their way in to see the collection, they found 'many of
the most important specimens were missing'.
After that the collection was steadily lost: by T835 it was
being kept in four small cases. What was left must have been
only a fraction of Hutton's legacy - the great boulders from
Glen Tilt and Arran had certainly gone. In 1855 the entire
contents of the Natural History Museum were transferred to a
new museum, now known as the Royal Scottish Museum. But
the new museum's catalogue does not mention Hutton's
material. The last remnants of the collection must have been
re-labelled, dispersed or discarded before the move; even if any
of Hutton's specimens did finish up in the Royal Museum, it
would be impossible to identify them.
Thus Hutton's precious collection was destroyed, his 'God's
Library' broken up at the hands of his intellectual opponents.
None of Hutton's own rocks would survive to be shown in his
1997 rock garden on St John's Hill.
As for Hutton's manuscript on agriculture, Playfair dutifully
read it through, but it appears never to have been published.
Bound up in two volumes, the manuscript disappeared from
view for sixty years. It came at last into the hands of James
Melvin, vice-president of the Edinburgh Geological Society,
and in r887 he gave it to that Society. Since 1949 the manu­
script has been on permanent loan to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh.
The rest of Hutton's archive was not spared. As was the
practice of the time, his executors destroyed much material we
would now treasure, including most of his manuscripts and his
letters. Even Hutton's field notebooks were burned.
 EPILOGUE 227
Handwritten drafts of some of the chapters that would have
been the backbone of the two later volumes of Hutton's
Theory of the Earth did pass into Playfair's hands from Lord
Webb Seymour, who had made the return trip to Glen Tilt
with Playfair in 1807. Playfair tried to publish the material,
but there were difficulties with obtaining the engravings.
When John Clerk of Eldin died in 1812, the reconstruction of
the drawings became impossible.
The manuscript eventually passed to Leonard Horner. Horner
was the younger brother of Francis, who had mused on cycles
of history during Hutton's 1785 presentation. Horner became
a mineralogist, rising to become president of the Geological
Society; Charles Lyell married Horner's daughter, Mary. In
1856, Horner donated some of the Hutton manuscripts to the
safekeeping of the library of the Geological Society at
Burlington House in London. These bound manuscripts were
set on a shelf alongside the two printed volumes of the Theory.
There they were lost, and forgotten.
In the 1890s, a Canadian geologist called Frank D. Adams came
to the library. Adams asked to see the two published volumes of
the Theory - and was startled to be handed in addition a shabby
bound manuscript. The library assistant thought Adams might
find something of interest in 'this old thing'. It was the Hutton
essays.
In June 2002, I visited Burlington House to view Hutton's
manuscript. Burlington House is just off Piccadilly, London.
Like many of Britain's great institutions, there is a vaguely
museum-like feel to the place: I read the Hutton manuscript in
the Upper Library, a multistorey atrium with a glass roof and
pillars, where chandelier light glints from computer terminals,
and clocks chime the hours melodically.
The manuscript itself is unprepossessing, a little more than
two hundred quarto-sized pages hard-bound in pale brown
cloth. Evidently the manuscript was left lying around for some
time, for the first page is soiled and torn, and had to be repaired
by sticking a leaf to its back. The pages are unlined and hand­
written on one side of the paper. It felt strange and a little scary
to handle a manuscript so old. It seems remarkable it has
survived as well as it has; the paper is largely free of yellowing
and unsoiled.
228 AGES IN CHAOS

Horner treasured the fragile' pages that’ had come into his
possession. In a pasted-in frontispiece, beneath his coat of arms,
he wrote by hand, in a note dated November 1856, of how he
came into the possession of 'This ms. volume (part of a series)
of Dr Hutton's, with some additions in his own hand ... I give it
to the Geological Society, to be preserved in the Library, as an
interesting document in the History of the Science.'
What we actually have here is a little mysterious. As Horner
notes, this volume is one of a series - but it is the only one we
have. The pages are numbered, by hand, from p. 139 to p. 346,
and we have six chapters numbered from Four to Nine.
Chapters Four, Five and Nine are essentially field reports of
Hutton's trips to Glen Tilt in 1785, Cairnsmore in 1786, and
Arran in 1787. Chapters Six to Eight are write-ups of Hutton's
reading of a new volume by de Saussure about the Alps
published in 1786, of a book on the Pyrenees published in
1781, and a book on Calabria published in 1784.
When were these pieces written? The fieldtrip chapters are
written in the form of diaries. In the Arran chapter, Hutton says
he fulfilled his ambition to study Arran 'this summer 1787' (p.
296). But elsewhere in the same essay, he refers to letters by one
Abraham Mills not published in the Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society until 1790.
My own impression is that this manuscript was indeed
written out after the drafting of Volumes One and Two of the
Theory. Hutton had his fieldwork essays and notes on his
reading to hand; he read through this material to his
amanuensis somewhat hastily, with added observations.
Perhaps Webb, Playfair or Horner knew what became of the
rest of the 'series' of manuscript chapters, bound or otherwise,
that would have made up Volumes Three and Four.
Even the material we have is sadly incomplete. There are
references to plates now lost. Of one lost drawing by Clerk of
a granite intrusion they saw near Crieff in 1786 Hutton said,
'[it] will convince the most sceptical with regard to this
doctrine of the transfusion of granite.'
For me, the main value of holding this manuscript was the
feeling it gave that I was in the presence of Hutton himself.
The manuscript has been written out in a neat, flowing
copperplate by an amanuensis (perhaps Isabella) who took
 EPILOGUE 229
down Hutton's dictation, evidently for hours on end. But here
and there Hutton has made his own hand corrections, striking
out lines or adding notes in a bolder, blotchier, more uneven
hand. The prose is verbose, the corrections few and far
between; evidently this is a work dictated in haste.
The field reports are in places bright and vivid, and Hutton's
personal observations are sometimes delightful: of Glen Rosa
on Arran he says, 'in this dreary glen is to be found a charming
picture of nature in decay, or of lofty mountains going into
ruin, apparently without a purpose' (p. 311). He was friendly and
inclusive: on Arran, having happily observed a junction between
granite and schistus, he made an expedition to another loca­
tion called Glen Shant as 'I wished to give Mr Clerk the same
satisfaction' (p. 314).
Hutton's only surviving geological section shows how this
junction proceeds 'in great steps'. It is just a little square figure
drawn on p. 315, perhaps a centimetre across, with a staircase
line dividing the schistus (horizontal bands) from the granite
(dots).
Perhaps most touching of all is a footnote to p. 233,
concerning Alpine structures, which Hutton wrote out on a
scrap of paper that has been stuck to the back of p. 208. Horner
has noted, 'This is most probably the handwriting of Dr
Hutton. See the back of the paper.' And indeed, if you look
carefully, you can make out an address: 'Doctor Hutton - St
John's Hili'.

The unconformity at Siccar Point is a contact between rocks

now thought to have been formed in the Silurian period,
perhaps 420 million years ago, and the late Devonian, some
360 million years ago. So the rock types you see exposed under
the cliffs are separated in time by some eighty million years -
and even that gap is more than ten thousand times longer than
all of Bishop Ussher's history.
As the shallow seas of the dinosaur ages flooded the Earth,
great thicknesses of chalk were laid down over the unconform­
ity, hiding it like an exhibit in some great buried museum: the
geologists say it was a 'hidden landscape'. The chalk layers
themselves took perhaps 150 million years to form. A mere two
million years ago, the glaciers sliced away the softer surface
230 AGES IN CHAOS

rocks to expose the unconformity to the air, and Hutton's

view. The unconformity is still there today, of course. But
everything exposed to the air is subject to erosion. In a few
more millions of years the unconformity will itself be gone,
greywackes, sandstone, strata and all.
It is hard for us now to grasp the cosiness of Bishop Ussher's
timescale. The whole history of Earth could be measured in a
few human generations, and the mummies of Egypt had been
buried in an age halfway back to creation itself. It was time
built on a human scale, comprehensible and brief; and we
humans were secure within its scriptural walls.
Hutton knocked all that away.
The abyss of time defies the imagination. We would expect
a photograph of a landscape taken today to look essentially the
same as one taken a hundred years ago. But over historical
time we know that rivers have diverted from their courses, and
estuaries have silted up, stranding many former sea ports deep
in the interior of the land. On longer time scales, Earth's
surface billows restlessly. The land surface of North America
is washing away at the rate of a few hundredths of a millimetre
each year - while the Niagara Falls, cut back at the rate of a
metre a year, are positively evaporating. If you could fast-
forward your perception of time, so that a million years passed
in a few minutes, you would see mountains bloom and fade, as
transient as flowers.
We are almost at the mid-point of Earth's lifespan of some
ten billion years. Hutton said that in the rocky biography of
Earth we would find 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of
an end'. And he was right: the oldest rocks to be found on
Earth's surface, survivors of more than four billion years of
tectonic processing, are essentially the same as those being
formed today. It is astrophysical events, events beyond Earth,
that govern the beginning and the end of the world: Earth's
birth from a cloud of jostling rocks, and its fiery death when
the dying sun swells to a red giant. Modern humans have
existed for perhaps a hundred thousand years, a fleeting instant
compared to Earth's titanic biography, like a single second at
noon set against a full day. Our knowledge of our brevity, and
the awesome expanses of time around us, are Hutton's
astonishing and terrifying gift.
 EPILOGUE 231
Today, living in Hutton's shadow, we take an ancient Earth
for granted. We can scarcely imagine the drama of those
moments when James Hutton saw limitless time in a few
broken rocks and a handful of soil.

*
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my agent Robert Kirby of PFD, London, for a bright

idea. I'm grateful to my brother, Dr Anthony Baxter FFPHM,
for his speculations on the cause of Hutton's death. Mr Bill
Veitch of Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, was very kind in allowing
me to visit Hutton's unconformity by the banks of the Jed,
which is within his property. I'm grateful to Andrew Mussell
and Wendy Cawthorne of the Geological Society of London for
allowing me to view Hutton's geological manuscript. Ms Vicki
Ingpen of the Royal Society of Edinburgh was exceptionally
generous in assisting me with my research.
 FURTHER READING

Source Material and General References

James Hutton, 'Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the

Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and
Restoration of Land upon the Globe', Transactions of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. i, pp. 209-305 (1788). This
paper, first read by Hutton to the Royal Society of Edinburgh
in 1785, was the first publication of his theory of Earth's cycles
and age. The paper is in the public domain and is available, for
example, at www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/essays/hutton.html. The
printed form has some modifications from Hutton's original
1785 oral presentation, but it is the best account we have of
what was said.
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations
(Edinburgh, William Creech, 1795). This is Hutton's full expli­
cation of his theories. Only two volumes of a projected four
were published in Hutton's lifetime.
James Hutton, Geological MSS of Dr Hutton, Geological
Society of London archive holding LDGSL 753. Portions of the
'lost' volumes of Hutton's Theory of the Earth.
Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton in the Field and in the Study
(New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1997). Published
for the bicentenary of Hutton's death, a handsome facsimile
edition of Geikie's 1899 edition of the above, with illustrations
and manuscript pages.
John Playfair, 'Account of the Late Dr James Hutton',
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 5, part 3,
PP- 39—99 (1805). This is the primary source for biographical
information on Hutton, a brief account prepared after his death
by his close friend John Playfair and read to the Royal Society
of Edinburgh on 10 January 1803. Playfair's aim, however, was
to present Hutton and his work and thinking in what he saw as
the best light; he was an evangelist for Hutton, and as history
his writings have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
234 FURTHER READING

Dennis R. Dean, fames Hutton and the' History of Geology

(New York: Cornell University Press, 1992). Detailed academic
work on Hutton's writings and their reception by and influence
on geologists.
Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and
Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Harvard, Mass.,
1987). A fine exploration of Hutton's scientific thinking, focus­
ing on his use of design arguments - though unnecessarily harsh
on Hutton's achievements as a field scientist. Also contains an
interesting study of Burnet, and of Lyell's uniformitarianism.
Various authors, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
B vol. 63, pp. 351-400. This is the publication of papers from a
conference held in 1947 to commemorate the 150th anniversary
of Hutton's death. It includes 'James Hutton, Founder of Modern
Geology' by E. B. Bailey, 'Hutton on Arran' by G. W. Tyrrell, and
'James Hutton and the Philosophy of Geology' by S. I. Tomkeieff.
G. Y. Craig and J. H. Hull (eds.), fames Hutton - Present and
Future (London: Geological Society, 1999). This volume is based
on papers presented at a conference held in Edinburgh in 1997
to celebrate the bicentenary of Hutton's death. It includes
useful papers relating to a modern updating of Hutton's ideas by
P. Wyllie on Hall's experimental geology, W. Schreyer on the
metamorphosis of rocks, and A. Watson on the Gaia hypothesis.

Prologue

Stephen Baxter, Moonseed (London: HarperCollins, 1998). A

geological disaster story set in Edinburgh.
Gregory Benford, Deep Time (New York: Avon, 1999). A medi­
tation on the modern view of time and mankind's attempts
to challenge its immensity, from pyramids to interstellar
spacecraft.
Donald McIntyre and Alan McKirdy, fames Hutton, The
Founder of Modern Geology (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1997). A brief
popular biography of Hutton, focusing on the geology, but
portraying Hutton retrospectively as a modern scientist.
 FURTHER READING ^35
One: Deposition

Iain Gordon Brown and Hugh Cheape, Witness to Rebellion:

John Maclean's Journal of the ’Forty-five and the Penicuik
Drawings (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1995). The war diary
of one of Bonnie Prince Charlie's officers, and caricatures of
figures of the Jacobite rising from the Clerk family collection
at Penicuik.
Archibald Clow, 'Dr James Hutton and the Manufacture of Sal
Ammoniac' Nature, vol. 159, pp. 425-27 (1947). How Hutton
and Davie made a profit from Edinburgh soot.
Martin Gorst, Aeons: The Search for the Beginning of Time
(London: Fourth Estate, 2001). Entertaining survey of efforts
to determine the age of Earth and the universe, including
biographical material on James Ussher.
Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (London:
W. W. Norton, 1983). This collection of essays contains
illuminating pieces on Steno, Cuvier and Hutton himself.
Jean Jones, 'James Hutton's Agricultural Research and Life as a
Farmer', Annals of Science, vol. 42, pp. 573-601 (1985). A
useful biographical survey of Hutton's farming years, drawing
on letters and an unpublished manuscript.
John Prebble, The Lion in the North (London: Penguin, 1981).
One of this journalist and author's several excellent and vivid
works on Scottish history.

Two: Consolidation

Neil Campbell and R. Martin Smellie, The Royal Society of

Edinburgh (1-783—1983) (Edinburgh: Royal Society of Edinburgh,
1983). A bicentenary celebration and history of the Society.
V. A. Eyles, 'Some Geological Correspondence of James
Hutton', Annals Of Science, vol. 7, pp. 316-39 (1951). Some of
Hutton's rare surviving correspondence, from about 1770.
Adam Ferguson, 'Minutes of the Life and Character of Joseph
Black MD', Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
vol. 5, part 3, pp. 101-17 (1805). A biography of one of Hutton's
236 FURTHER READING

friends by another, with illuminating insights into their

relationships.
Patsy A. Gerstner, 'The Reaction to James Hutton's Use of
Heat as a Geological Agent', British Journal for the Historyof
Science, vol. 3, pp. 353-62 (1971). Exploration of Hutton's
idiosyncratic views on the nature of heat.
Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’
Invention of the Modern World (London: Fourth Estate, 2001).
Enthusiastic if uncritical celebration of the Scottish
Enlightenment and its impact.
James Hutton, 'A note on Adam Smith's death', Transactions
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 3, p. 13m.
Jean Jones, Hugh Torrens and Eric Robinson, 'The
Correspondence between James Hutton (1726-1797) and
James Watt (1736-1819) with Two Letters from Hutton to
George Clerk-Maxwell (1715-1784)', Annals of Science, vol.
51, pp. 637-53 (1994), and vol. 52, p. 357-82 (1995)- These
letters give a rare glimpse of Hutton's private life and his
fieldwork - especially his geological tour of 1774.
Donald B. McIntyre, 'James Hutton's Edinburgh: The Historical,
Social, and Political Background', Earth Sciences History, vol.
16, pp. 100-57 (i997)- Informative survey of Hutton's Edinburgh
years.
J. E. O'Rourke, 'A Comparison of James Hutton's Principles of
Knowledge and Theory of the Earth', Isis, vol. 69, pp. 5-20
(1978). An exploration of Hutton's theory of knowledge and
how it applied to his geological thinking.
Stephanie Pain, 'The Flute-maker's Fiddle', New Scientist, 9
March 2002. Young James Watt's possible forgeries of flutes.
David Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of
Enlightenment Scotland and their Rituals (East Linton:
Tuckwell Press, 2001). Analysis of the sexual underside of the
Scottish Enlightenment.

Three: Uplift

John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological

 FURTHER READING 237
Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Sets out
a modern version of the old arguments that the universe has
in some sense been created to support man, and includes
historical material on design arguments.
Stephen Baxter, Deep Future (London: Gollancz, 2001). A
sketch of the far future of humanity in an expanding universe.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Longman,
1986). Dawkins' impassioned defence of Darwinism.
James Lawrence Powell, Mysteries of Terra Firma (New York:
Free Press, 2001). Accessible account of the development of
geology in the twentieth century.
James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979). Lovelock's statement of his
'living world' hypothesis.
Peter Ward, The End of Evolution (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1995). A survey of mass extinctions by an expert in
the field.
A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (London: John Murray, 1999). An
account of the crisis of faith in nineteenth-century Britain,
partly predicated by geology.
Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: The
Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science (London:
Viking, 2001). Informative if hagiographic study of the founder
of stratigraphy.

Epilogue

C. D. Waterston, Collection in Context: The Museum of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Inception of a National
Museum for Scotland (Edinburgh: NMS Publishing, 1997).
Contains information on the fate of Hutton's rock collection.
 INDEX

Aberdeen, 12, 34, 68, 69 Balnagown, 70 Black Watch, 33, 119

Academy of Sciences, 55, Banks, Sir Joseph, 97, 115 Blair Castle, 151, 152
117, 174 Barrow, John, 221 Blake, Anne (later Anne
Act of Supremacy, 18 Basle, 48 Kirwan), 171
Act of Uniformity, 18 Bass Rock, 1 Blake, Sir Thomas, 171
Act of Union, 28, 29, 32 see Bath, 96, 112, 113, 116 Board of Longitude, 104
also Union Beagle, 207, 208 Boerhaave, Hermann, 42
Adam, Robert, 35, 86, 90 Beaker Folk, 13 Boston Tea Party, 118
Adams, Frank D., 227 Beggar's Benison, 94, 114, Boswell, James, 24, 87, 108,
Africa, 97, 182, 212 155, 175 120
Agassiz, Louis, 207 Belton, 60 Boulton, Matthew, 108, 109,
Agricola, Georgius: De Re Berkeley, George, 91 112, 123, 223
Metallica, 48 Berwick, 34, 36 Bowditch, Nathaniel, 172
Alkrington Hall, 114 Berwickshire, 1, 3, 15, 59, Boyle, Robert, 106
Alps, 51, 74, 109, 179, 184, 65, 66, 67, 201 see also Brabant, 63
202, 214, 216, 228, 229 names of places in Bridgnorth, 80, in
America, 27, 49, 118-20 Berwickshire Britain, 33, 41, 47, 118, 119,
Constitution, 120 Bible 120, 175, 176, 207, 223 see
Declaration of and Deists, 27 also names of individual
Independence, 119 and ideas of Burnet, 51-2, countries
see also American War of 55 British Geological Survey,
Independence; North and ideas of JH, 63, 64 217
America Ussher's work on British Library, 199
American War of chronology of, 18, 20, 21-2 Britons, 13
Independence, 152 other references, 6, 17, 48, Brodie, Duncan, 156
Analytical Review, 162 49, 55, 56, 81, 166 Brown, John, 40
Angles, 13 see also Genesis, Book of Brussels, 46
Anglesey, 113-14, 116 Birmingham, 108, 109, in, Buckland, William, 43
Apennine mountains, 48 116, 123 Buffon, Georges-Louis
Aquinas, St Thomas, 43 Black, Joseph Leclerc de, 55, 192
Aristotle, 19, 42-3, 44, 75, biographical information, Burlington House, 200, 227
179, 114 88-9 Burn Pitt colliery, 99
Arran, 154, 156-7, 163, 179, chemistry experiments, Burnet, Reverend Thomas,
189, 226, 228, 229 88-9, 101, 102 51-3, 54, 74, 80, 99, 125,
Arthur's Seat, 5, 36, 95, 135, death, 193 192, 214
184 friendship with JH, 89, 95 Telluris Theoria Sacra, 51
Asia, 3, 212 and JH's theory, 75, 89, Burns, Robert, 12, 120, 152,
Atholl, fourth Duke of, 151, 101, 106, 127, 130, 195 155, 177
152, 153, 161 and Oyster Club, 120 Buxton, 115
Atlantic, 47, 85 personality, 89 Byron, Lord, 200
Augustine, St, 19 and Poker Club, 93
Australia, 213 and Russian links, 122 Cairnsmore, 154, 228
Auvergne, 155, 202 student's impression of, Caithness, 69
Ayr, 154 123 Calabria, 179, 228
and Watt, 103, 104, 122-3, Caledonian mountain range,
Babylonians, 18 175, 181 3
Bacon, Francis, 43, 151 other references, 99, 108, Calgacus, 13
Bakewell, Robert: 113, 119, 121, 124, 147, Calton Hill, 134
Introduction to Geology, 155, 161, 164, 165, 167, Cambridge, 51
205 168, 191, 222, 225 University, 17
 INDEX ^39
Cambridgeshire, 61 JH's letters to, 71, 80, Derby, 37
Campsy-lin, 135 96-7, hi, 112, 113 Derbyshire, 61, 109, 116
Canada, 213 see also North Cloughballymore, 170 Descartes, René, 26, 50, 52
America Clyde coast, 154 Desmarest, Nicolas, 100,
Carnot, Sadi, 106 Coalbrookdale, 113 102, 150, 165
Castle Hill, Edinburgh, 5, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Diderot, Denis, 122
86, 87 199 Douglas, Charles, 222
Catholics/Catholicism, 18, College Company of Drogheda, 18, 21
21, 170, 172, 173 see also Volunteers, 34 Drummond, George, 34, 36,
Church of Rome College of Surgeons, 87 38
Celtic society, 13-14 Comte, Auguste, 124 Drummond castle, 135
Cerrig y Bleiddie, 114 'Conciliatory Proposals', 119 Dublin, 17, 18, 172, 226
'Challenger' expedition, Cook, Captain, 87, 88, 97, Dublin Library Society, 223
225 115, 123 Dudley, hi
Charles I, King, 21, 32 Copernican System, 148 Dundas, Henry, 175
Charles Edward, Prince see Copernicus, 7 Dundee, 121
Stuart, Charles Edward, the Corfe Castle, 61 Dunglass, 67, 121, 159
Young Pretender (Bonnie Cornwall, 113, 180, 201 Collegiate Church, 224
Prince Charlie) Cornwallis, Charles, ist Dunrobin Castle, 70
Charlotte Square, Marquis, 119 Durham, 36
Edinburgh, 86 Creech, William, 94, 155, Dybold, John, 60, 61
Cheshire, 108, 134 177 Dyson, Freeman, 221
Chile, 208 Crieff, 68, 69, 107, 135, 228
Chinese, the, 23, 102 Critical Review, 162 East Anglia, 61, 72 see also
Christ, 19, 20, 21, 53 Cromarty, Firth of, 69 Norfolk; Suffolk
Christianity, 18, 19, 74, 149, Cromwell, Oliver, 21, 22 Eden, 22, 53
176 Culloden, 34, 37-8, 38-9 Edinburgh
Church of England, 22 Culross, 123 and Act of Union, 32
Church of Rome, 14 see also Cumberland, 192 author's visit to, 4-5
Catholics/Catholicism Cumberland, Duke of, 37, clubs, 92-4, 120-21, 128,
Church of Scotland see Kirk 38 196
of Scotland Curie, Marie and Pierre, 211 description of, 24, 85-6
Circulation Club, 93 Cuvier, Georges, 202, 204-5, expansion, 85-6
Clearances, 69 206, 207 geology, 5, 47, 107, 134
Clerk, Sir John, 29, 36-7, JH's association with, n,
38-9, 94 Dalwhinnie, 68 24, 57, 58, 59, 80, 81, 85,
Clerk, John (son of John Darwin, Charles, 7, 17, 92, 87, 99, 120, 123, 222
Clerk of Eldin), 156, 159, no, 207-9, 210-11, 220 and Jacobite rising (1745),
177, 180 Origin of the Species, 209 31, 34-7, 38
Clerk of Eldin, John Darwin, Erasmus, 109-10, and medicine, 40, 41, 42
friendship with JH, 29, 67 115, 123, 162, 199 visited by Burns, 155
and JH's geological trips, Botanic Gardens, 162 visited by Franklin, 118
151-2, 153, 154, 156 Dashkov, Catherina other references, 12, 64,
and mining operations, Romanova Vorontsov, 122 68, 72, 90, 96, 122, 175, 176
67-8 Davie, James, 57, 58, 79, see also names of places
and naval warfare, 152-3, 104, 112, 223 and institutions in
199 Dawkins, Richard, 220 Edinburgh
other references, 87, 90, de Lancey, Colonel William, Edinburgh Castle, 5, 34, 124
127, 129, 133, 227, 228 224 Edinburgh Geological
Clerk-Maxwell, Dorothea, Declaration of Independence, Society, 226
68 119 Edinburgh High School, 15,
Clerk-Maxwell, George Dee, River, 151 16
birth, 29 Deism, 27, 44, 74, 78, 126, Edinburgh Review, 201
in Cumberland's army, 37 206 Edinburgh University, 24,
Highland tour, 68, 69, Delftfield Pottery Company, 25, 29, 40, 41, 121, 122,
116 102 128, 148, 149
involved in Forth and Deluc, Jean André, 163-4, Natural History Museum,
Clyde canal project, 87 167, 181 225 226
240 INDEX

Egypt, 49, 230 see also French Grand Canyon, 136

Elizabeth I, Queen, 18 Revolution Gray, Thomas, 85
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Franklin, Benjamin, 27, 87, ’Great Chain of Being' idea,
7, 120, 189 no, 118, 119, 129 44-5, 117
England, 1, 3, 21, 27, 32, 37,, Frederick the Great, 118 Great Glen, 47, 68
63, 64, 70, 107, 151 Freiburg, 125 Great Years, 18, 19
geology, 2, 3, 45, 47, 61-2 , French Revolution, 172, 174 Greece, 140
143, 178, 200 Friday Club, 196 Greeks, 19, 48, 102, 140, 174
see also Britain; names of Greenland, 47
places in England 'Gaia hypothesis', 219 Greenock, 38, 103
English Channel, 178 Galapagos, 209 Greville, Charles Francis,
English Civil War, 21 Galloway, 154, 163, 179 113
English language, 12 Garry, River, 151 Greyfriars Kirkyard,
Enlightenment see Scottish valley of, 152 Edinburgh, 222
Enlightenment Geikie, Sir Archibald, 132, Guthrie, Matthew, 150
Europe, continent of, 47 217
Genesis, Book of, 20, 22 52, Hall, Sir James
Fahlun, 114 54, 74-5, 116, 149, 163 accompanies JH to Siccar
Faujas de Saint-Fond, Geological Society, 199-200, Point, 2, 8, 67, 159-60
Barthelemy, 123-4, 165,189 201, 208, 227, 228 biographical information,
Fealar, 153 George III, King, no, 118 121
Ferguson, Adam George IV, King, 94 carries forward JH's work,
comments on Black, 88, Germany, 49, 100 189-91, 194, 196-7, 201,
193 Giant's Causeway, 109, 202 202-3, 205
comments on JH, 57, 66, Gibbon, Edward: Decline death, 224
70, 71, 168 and Fall of the Roman portraits, 121, 225
and Royal Society of Empire, 176 and Royal Society of
Edinburgh, 128, 225 Gibraltar, 97 Edinburgh, 129
secretary of Peace Glasgow, 12, 34, 37, 85, 102, other references, 109, 147,
Commission, 119 103, hi, 154, 175 148, 150, 216
view of Highlanders, 119 University, 25, 88, 104 Hall, Sir John, 67, 121, 224
Fife, 94 Glen Rosa, 229 Hall, Helen, 224
Fingal's Cave, 124 Glen Shant, 229 Hall, Magdalene, 224
Flanders, 63 Glen Tilt, 152, 153, 154, Hamilton (nee Hart), Emma,
Forest Lodge, 151-2 163, 179, 196, 222, 226, 113
Forsyth, Robert, 72 227, 228 Hamilton, Sir William, 113
Fort Augustus, 68 Goat Fell, 156 Hannibal, 214
Fort George, 69 God Harris, John: Lexicon
Forth and Clyde canal, 79, 87 and creation of the world, Technicum, 25
Forth and Clyde Navigation 17, 19, 21-2, 51-2 Harrison, John, 104
Company, 87 Deist thought, 27 Hart, Emma (later Emma
'Forty Five', see the Jacobite and fossils, 49 Hamilton), 113
uprising (1745) and ideas about design Harvey, William, 42, 43-4,
France and final cause, 43-4, 77, 93, 144, 221
and America, 118, 119 219-20 Hawaii, 216
and Deism, 27 and ideas of Burnet, 51-2 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich,
geology, 45, 100, 155, 178 and ideas of Hume, 92 119
Hume visits, 90 and ideas of JH, 44, 45, Henry VIII, King, 14, 157-8,
JH visits, 41, 45 74-5, 79, 97, 149, 182, 192, 224
JH's agricultural work 219-20 Heriot's Hospital,
recognized in, 183 and ideas of Lyell, 206 Edinburgh, 155
Reign of Terror, 174-5 and ideas of Newton, 26-7 Hero of Alexandria, 102
and Scotland, 32, 33 and ideas of Werner, 126 Herodotus, 49
wars with Britain, 33, 41, Gosse, Philip, 22 Highlanders, 14, 30, 31, 33,
152 Gould, Stephen Jay, 6, 76, 35, 36, 37, 38, 68-9, 119
other references, 49, 55, 216 Highlands, 13-14, 30, 33,
170, 206 Grampians, 68 38, 60, 78, 116, 151, 153
 INDEX 24I

Himalayas, 3, 216 as legal clerk, 28-9 expedition to Highlands,

Hippo, 19 and Jacobite uprising 151-5
His Majesty's Mines in (i745), 34, 37, 38 expedition to Arran,
Ireland, 223 view of medical 156-7
Holland, 63, 64 profession, 40-41 at Jedburgh, 157-9
Holmes, Arthur, 212 in Paris, 41, 45 at Siccar Point, 1, 2, 3-4,
Holyhead, nr at Leiden University, 41-2 8, 159-61
Holyrood Park, 36 academic thesis, 42-5 publication of paper, 162
Holyroodhouse, 36, 122 awarded medical degree, reactions to paper, 162-4
Honourable Society of 45 illness, 164-5
Improvers in the response to Burnet's work, publishes books, 167-8,
Knowledge of Agriculture, 54 177, 178-80
60 returns to Edinburgh, 57 ideas attacked by Kirwan,
Hooke, Robert, 106 does not pursue medical 168-9, 173-4, 181-3
Horner, Francis, 192, 196, career, 57 writes about agriculture,
227 and sal ammoniac 183-4
Horner, Leonard, 227, 228 business, 57-8, 79, 123 health deteriorates, 183,
House of Lords, 156 scandal, 58-9 184
Hoyle, Fred, 220-21 birth of illegitimate son, last days, 184-5
Hume, David 59 death, 185
and America, 120 agricultural work and ideas carried forward after
biographical information, studies, 59, 60-61, 63, 65-7, his death, 189-93, 196-8,
90 71-2, 79, 80, 95, 183-4 199, 201-3, 204, 206, 207,
death, 120 social life during farming 209,
ideas, 91-2, 124 years, 67-8 214
influence on JH, 90-92, tours Highlands, 68-71 continuing attacks on
124, 125, 131, 149, 167 crisis of faith, 73, 74-5 ideas, 193-5
other references, 15, 67, involved in Forth and biography of, 195-6
69, 87, 89, 118, 122 Clyde canal project, 79 and geological maps, 201
Writings: moves back to Edinburgh, assessment of
Dialogues Concerning 80, 85 achievement, 214-18,
Natural Religion 92 circle of friends in 219-20, 221
History of England, 90 Edinburgh, 87, 89, 90 burial, 222
Treatise on Human joins Philosophical memorial garden, 222
Nature, 90 Society, 87-8 rock collection, 225-6
Hume, James, 67 influenced by Hume, 90-92, manuscripts, 226-9
Hutton, Isabella (JH's sister), 124, 125, 131, 149, 167 Writings:
11, 167, 191, 222, 225, 228 social activities, 96-7, 'Abstract of a Dissertation
Hutton, James 120-21, 155 Read in the Royal Society
geological studies and describes test for coal, 95 of Edinburgh', 149-50, 216
ideas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 48, 5b friendship with Watt, 99, Considerations on the
61-4, 69-71, 72-3, 75-9, 104-5, 112-13 Nature, Quality and
80-81, 97-8, 99-102, travels in England and Distinctions of Coal and
105-7, 108-9, 111-12, Wales, 108-16 Culm, 95
113-14, 116-17, 123-5, sets up Oyster Club, De Sanguine et
127, 130-45, 146-61, 166, 120-21 Circulatione in
176, 177-80, 181, 214-18, commercial projects, 123 Microcosmi, 42
219-20, 221, 230-31 Founding Fellow of Royal A Dissertation Upon the
portrait of, ix, 4, 96 Society of Edinburgh, 129 Philosophy of Light, Heat
author's research into, 7-8 presents paper to Royal and Fire, 177
birth, 11 Society of Edinburgh, Dissertations on Different
family background, n-12, 130-45 Subjects in Natural
15 paper discussed by Royal Philosophy, 167
schooldays, 15-16 Society of Edinburgh, Elements of Agriculture,
character, 15-16, 30, 97 146-9 183, 184
student at Edinburgh produces Abstract of 'The Flexibility of the
University, 24-8, 29, 41 paper, i49~5° Brazilian Stone', 184
242 INDEX

Principles of Knowledge, Johnson, Samuel, 32, 33, Lammermuir Hills, 65, 66

167-8, 177, 185, 199 92, 112 Lancaster, 37
'The Sulphurating of Joule, 106 Laney, Colonel William de,
Metals', 184 Judaic tradition, 19 224
Theory of the Earth Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent,
(book), 4, 177, 178-80, 181, Kant, Immanuel, 124 129, 138, 166, 171, 174*
191-2, 196, 199, 223, 224, Kay, John, 89 Leiden, 41-2
227, 228 Kazakhstan, 216 University of, 40, 41, 42
'Theory of the Earth' Keir, James, 109, hi Leith, 190
(paper), 162, 183, 225 Kelvin (of Largs), William Water of, 189
Hutton, James, Junior (JH's Thomson, Baron, 106, Leonardo da Vinci, 44, 48,
son), 222 209-10, 211, 212, 225 49, 56
Hutton, Jean (JH's sister], 11 Kenlochmudart, 34 Mona Lisa, 44
Hutton, John (JH's uncle), 6$ Keppel, Admiral, 152 Lever, Sir Ashton, 114
Hutton, Sarah (JH's mother), King George's War, 41 Lexington, 119
11, 15 Kinneil, 48, 99, 104, 105, Lichfield, no
Hutton, Sarah (JH's sister), 108 Lind, James, 40, 87
11 Kirk of Scotland (Church of Linlithgow, 31
Hutton, William (JH's Scotland), 14-15, 24, 122, Lister, Joseph, 225
father), 11, 15, 28, 65 149 Lister, Martin, 201
'Hutton's Section', 107 General Assembly, 14, Livorno, 50
Huttonians, 191, 196, 197, 122 Loch Ness, 68
199, 201, 208 Kirkcaldy, 89 Loch Ranza, 157
Kirwan [née Blake], Anne, Locke, John, 91
Ice Age, 49, 207 171 Lockhart, Captain, 70
Iceland, 97, 202 Kirwan, Richard London, 32, 57, no, 114,
India, 3 attacks JH's theory, 8, 119, 171, 200, 208, 227
Industrial Revolution, 98, 168-9, 173-4, 176, 181-3, Lot, Thomas, 103
105, H3 194, 123-4 Lothian, Marquis of, 67
Inverness, 68 biographical information, Louis XV, King, 41
Ireland, 13, 17-18, 21, 170, 170-74, 223 Lovelock, James, 219
172, 202 JH's response to attack by,Low Countries, 41, 45, 63
Irish Army, 21 178-9 Lowlanders, 14, 69
Ironbridge, 113 Playfair tries to counter Lowlands, 60, 153
Irvine, Dr, 156 attacks of, 192 Lucerne, 202
Isaiah, 63 other references, 189, 199,Lunar Society, 109, in
Isle of Man, 161 226 Lunardi, Vicenzo, 155
Isle of Sheppey, 136 Writings: Lyell, Charles
Isle of Wight, 61, 62, 134 'Essay on Phlogiston', 171 accompanies Hall to
Italy, 49, 113, 121, 140, 206 'Examination of the Siccar Point, 203
see also names of places in Supposed Igneous Origin of comments on Ussher's
Italy Stony Substances', 173-4 time frame, 126
Geological Essays, 194 and Darwin, 208, 209
Jacobite uprising: (1715), 29; 'On the Primitive State of ideas of, 204, 205-7
(174-SL 30-31, 32, 33-9, ISI the Globe and Its and JH's theory, 193, 203,
Jamaica, 104 Subsequent Catastrophe', 204, 206, 214
James V, King of Scotland, 181-2 other references, 49, 132,
94 Kirwanian Society of 217, 222, 227
James VI, King of Scotland, Dublin, 223 Principles of Geology,
18, 24 Knox, John, 14, 15 206, 207-8, 209
Jameson, Robert, 148, 225-6 Kokchetav Massif, 216
Jardin du Roi, 5 5 'Kurze Klassifikation', 155 Macbeth, 13
Jedburgh, 157-9, 177, 178, McIntyre, Donald, 7
217 La Fleche, 90 McKirdy, Alan, 7
Jenkins, Captain, 33 Labrador, 97 Maclaurin, Colin
Jerusalem, 20 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis, 174 death, 38
Jezebel Club, 94 Lake District, 161 influence on JH, 25-6, 27,
 INDEX 243
43, 74, 78, 125, 144 151, 163, 165-6, 172, 181, Picardy, 63
and Jacobite uprising 5
194- Picts, 13
11745), 34, 35, 36 Nether Monynut, 59, 65, 66, Pitt, William, 176
as mathematician, 25-6 222 Playfair, John
and Newton, 26-7 New Town, Edinburgh, 86 accompanies JH to Siccar
and Philosophical Society, Newcomen, Thomas, 103, Point, 2, 8, 159, 160-61
87, 128 104, 112, 223 Arran trip, 189
and Rankenian club, 128 Newfoundland, 47 biographical information,
other references, 86, 155 Newton, Sir Isaac 121
Maclaurin, John, 129 Burnet's correspondence carries forward work of
The Keekeiad, 129 with, 54 JH, 189-90, 191-3, 194,
McLean, Donald, 38 ideas of, 26-7 196, 201, 202
Maclean, John, 33-4, 37, 38 influence on Boerhaave, death, 202
Madison, James, 120 42 and JH's biography, 191,
Malta, 50 influence on Buffon, 5 5 6
195-
Malthus, Thomas: Essay influence on Hume, 91 and JH's papers, 227
on the Principle of influence on JH, 26, 44, and JH's rock collection,
Population, 208 79, 89, 125, 141, 144 226
Malvern hills, 180 influence on Maclaurin, and Royal Society of
Manchester, 37, 114 26-7 Edinburgh, 224
Manhattan Project, 212 other references, 11, 43, other references, 38, 57,
Manning, John, 60 56, 77, 106, 206 hi, 115, 116, 130, 131,

Marat, Jean Paul, 174 Niagara Falls, 230 149, 206

Marx, Karl, 119 Ninewells, 67, 90 Comments:
Mary, Queen of Scots, 14, Noah's Flood, 4, 23, 52, 53, on JH's father, 11
15 100, 182, 189, 205 on JH's mother, 15
Maskelyne, Neil, 115 Norfolk, 60-61, 62, 63, 66, 76 on JH's interest in
Mediterranean, 48 Normans, 13 chemistry, 25
Melvin, James, 226 North America, 47, 213, 230 on JH's student years, 28,
Midlands, 113 see also America; Canada 30
Midlothian, 29 North Sea, 62 on JH's loss of job as legal
Milan, 48 Northumberland, 61 clerk, 29
Mills, Abraham, 228 on Edinburgh medical
Milton, John: Paradise Lost, Ornai, 115 school, 41
53 Oxfordshire, 61 on JH's geological work,
Monboddo, Lord, 120 Oyster Club, 120-21, 122, 48, 62-3, 79, 142, 148, 151,
Monro, Alexander, 40, 87 225 157
Monro, John, 40 on JH's character, 58,
Monthly Review, 162, 163, Paley, William, 219 67-8, 89, 96-7, 195
164 Pangaea, 47 on JH's farming years, 59,
Mull, 33 Papin, Denis, 101, 102-3 61
Murray, John, 194 Paris, 41, 45, 55, 124, 126, on JH's friendship with
175, 183, 202 Clerk-Maxwell, 68
Naples, 113, 202 basin, 204 on lack of information in
bay of, 206 Parliament, 21 JH's papers, 75
National Maritime Parys copper mine, 114 on differing personalities
Museum, 198 Patterson, Claire, 212 of JH and Black, 89
National Portrait Gallery, Peace Commission, 119 on JH's conversation, 96
Edinburgh, 4, 121 Pelican Inn, Bath, 112 on JH's interest in Watt's
Natural History Museum, Penicuik, 36-7 work, 99
Edinburgh, 225, 226 Pennant, Thomas, 7r on geologists, 124-5
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Perth, 115 on JH's delay in
Babylon, 21 Philip III, King of Spain, r8 publishing, 127
Needles, the, 61, 62 Philosophical Society, 87-8, on JH's decision to
Nelson, Horatio, Admiral 128-9 present ideas in public, 129
Lord, 113, 198-9 Philosophical Transactions, on JH's reading habits,
Neptunists, 126, 144, 147, 127, 228 138
244 INDEX

on JH's writing style, Agriculture,"Paris, 183 education, 15, 24-5

146-7 Royal Dublin Society, 172 geology, 3, 47, 54, 70, 116,
on Jedburgh Royal Institution, 136, 143, 144, 201
unconformity, 158 Edinburgh, 224-5 history, 12-15, 32-9
on JH's controversy with Royal Irish Academy, 127, JH's comments on, 71
Deluc, 163, 164 172, 173, 181, 223 law, 28 *
on JH's ill-health, 164-5 Royal Mile, Edinburgh, n, unrest in, 175
on JH's ideas in Principles 85-6 other references, 21, 95,
of Knowledge, 167-8 Royal Scottish Museum, 192
on Kirwans' attack on 226 see also Britain; Scottish
JH's theory, 174 Royal Society of Edinburgh Enlightenment; names of
on JH's death, 185, 189 history of, 127-9, 224-5 places in Scotland
on further work needed JH's first presentation to, Scots (language), 12
on JH's theory, 214 130-45 Scots (people), 13
Writings: 'Kelvin's Room', 209 Scott, Walter, 35, 88, 152,
Biographical Account of meets to respond to JH's 155, 196, 199
the Late James Hutton, paper, 146-9 Scottish Association of the
195-6 papers given by supporters Friends of the People, 175
Illustrations of the of JH, 190, 192, 201 Scottish Command, 34
Huttonian Theory of the and publication of JH's Scottish Enlightenment, 15,
Earth, 192-3, 202 paper, 162 34, 60, 85, 86-7, 89-92,
Poitiers, 170 subsequent presentations 127, 175, 176
Poker Club, 93 by JH, 163, r68, 177, 184 Scottish National Portrait
Pope, Alexander, 32, 45 and Vulcanist/Neptunist Gallery, 4, 121
Portsoy, 133 dispute, 194-5 Seven Years War (1756-63),
Presbyterians, 149 see also other references, 121, 150, 118
Kirk of Scotland 151, 161, 199, 226 Shropshire, 113
Prestonpans, 58 Royal Society of London, 26, Shropshire Hills, 113
Priestley, Joseph, 109 109, 122, 127, 171 Siberia, 182
Pringle, James, 40 Russel, James, senior 72, 87 Siccar Point, 1-4, 8, 67,
Privy Council, 119 Russel, James, junior, 87, 159-61, 178, 196, 203, 217,
Protestants/Protestantism, 185 229-30
170-71, 172, 173 Russia, 122 Sicily, 113, 179, 206
Prussia, 118 Rutherford, Ernest, 211-12 Silliman, George, 196
Puritans, 21 Simeon Stylites, St, 176
Pyrenees, 179, 228 St Andrews, 118 Slave Province, 213
Pythagoras, 49 St John's Hill, Edinburgh, Slighhouses, 59, 65, 66, 67,
85, 97, 222, 226 68, 72, 90, 183, 222
Raeburn, Sir Henry, 4, 96 Saint-Omer, T70 Smeaton Hutton family, 222
Ranken's Inn, 128 St Petersburg Imperial Smellie, William, 120
Rankenian club, 128 Academy of Sciences, 122 Smith, Adam
Red Cross, 40 Salem, 172 and Scottish
Reformation, 14 Salisbury Crags, 85, T07, Enlightenment, 15, 89
Reign of Terror, 174, 175 135, 222-3 comments on America,
Rinns of Galloway, 154 Samson, St, 105 118-19
Robertson, Rev. William, Sandyhills Bay, 154 comments on Hume, 120
122, 128, 149, 192 Sanox, River, 157 death, 164
Robespierre, Maximilien de, Saussure, Horace Benedict destruction of papers, 164
175 De, 184, 228 as economist, 90
Robison, John, 104 Saxony, 125 and Faujas's visit to
Roebuck, John, 58, 104, 108 Schiehallion, 115 Edinburgh, 124
Romans, 13, 48, 140 Scone, 13 and Ferguson, 119
Rome, 202 Scotland friendship with JH, 89,
Rotterdam, 63 agriculture, 59-60 120
Rouelle, Professor François, and America, 120 and Oyster Club, 120
45, 46, 100, 126 and democracy, 17 5 and Royal Society of
Royal Academy of economy, 85 Edinburgh, 128, 225
 INDEX 245

Wealth of Nations, 90 Townsend, Reverend Joseph, and popular unrest, 175

Smith, William, 122, 202 sons, 174-5, 198
200-201, 204 Trafalgar, battle of, 198 statue, 4
Societies of United Transactions of the Royal steam engines, 48, 99,
Irishmen, 172 Society of Edinburgh, The, 104-5, 112-13, 122, 123
Society for the Improvement 129, 150, 162, 164, 184 other references, 58, 124,
of Medical Knowledge, 87 Tull, Jethro, 60 129, 134, 136, 144, 201, 222
Society of Antiquaries of Tuscany, 50 Watt, James, junior, 174-5
Scotland, 128 Tweed valley, 66 Webb Seymour, Lord, 227
Somerset, 200 Wedgwood, Josiah, 109
Sorbonne, the, 55 US Geological Survey, 152 Welsh borders, 80, in
South America, 212 Ukraine, 122 Werner, Abraham
Southern Uplands, 159 Ulster, 18 ideas of, 125-6, 127,
Spain, 33, 97, 118, 135 Union, 34, 60, 85, 158, 175 132-3, 139, 155, 163
Staffordshire, 116, 122 Act of, 28, 29, 32 JH challenges ideas of,
Stanley, 135 Urals, the, 97 134, 139, 147, 166
Steno, Nicolaus, 50-51, 63 Ussher, James, 17, 18, other references, 172,
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 96 20-23, 56/ 126, 140, 142, 225-6
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 210, 230 Short Classification and
156 The Annals of the World, Description of the Rocks,
Stirling plain, 14 17 155
Stoics, 19 Wernerians, 199, 202
Stourbridge, hi Veitch, Mr, 158, 159 West Lothian, 14
Strabo, 48, 137 Velikovsky, Immanuel, 52 Western Isles, 124
Strange, John, 70, 71, 201 Vesuvius, 121, 202 Westminster Abbey, 22, 223
Stuart, Charles Edward, the Voltaire, 86, 122 Weymouth, 61
Young Pretender (Bonnie Vulcanists, 165, 166, 194-5 Whitehurst, John, 109
Prince Charlie), 30-31, 32, Wilkinson, John, 122
33, 34, Wales, 107, no, m-12, William III, King, 51
35, 36, 37-8, 69, 93, 151 113-14, 116, 178, 181, 200 Williams, John: The Natural
Stuart, James Edward, the Walker, John, 128, 148, 149, History of the Mineral
Old Pretender, 32 225, 226 Kingdom, 163
Suffolk, 61 Wallace, Alfred, 208 Wiltshire, 112, 116
Sweden, 97, 100, 114 War of Jenkins's Ear, 33 Windermere, 161
Symington, William, 105 Warwickshire, 114, 116 Windward Isles, 153
Water of Leith, 189 Wolverhampton, 123
Tacitus, 13 Watt, Gregory, 198 Wordsworth, William, 152,
Tahiti, 115 Watt, James 174, 199
Tarf, valley of the, 153 biographical information, Wrekin, the, 113, 180
Tay, River, 135, 151 38, 103-5, 108, 109, Wright Brothers, 211
Temple of Jupiter Serapis, 112-13, 122-3, 223
206 and experimentation, 102, Yare, River, 62
Thomas Aquinas, St, 43 181, 196-7 Yarmouth, 60, 62
Thomson, William, Lord friendship with JH, 99, Yilgarn Block, 213
Kelvin see Kelvin (of 104-5 Yorkshire, 61, 192
Largs), William Thomson, JH's letters to, 16, 30, Yorktown, 119
Baron 104-5, m-12, 112-13, Young, George, 29, 87, 115
Tipler, Frank, 221 114, 116 Young, Thomas, 115
Tomkeieff, S.I., 217-18 letters to JH, 180-81, Young, Madam, 115
Torness, 1, 5, 224 7
196- 'Young Sun Paradox', 218
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Baxter is the critically acclaimed author of The Time

Ships, Deep Future, Evolution, Moonseed, and Voyage. With
Arthur C. Clarke, he wrote The Light of Other Days. Born in
1957, he was raised in Liverpool and has a degree in mathe­
matics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in aeroengi­
neering from the University of Southampton. He has won the
John W. Campbell Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and other
honors. He lives in Buckinghamshire, England.
is the a ■ar«*-winning1 author of numerous
acclaimed science fiction novels, including The
Time Ships and, with Arthur C. Clarke^ The Light
of Other Days and Times Eye.’ He has won the
Philip K. Dick Award twice, the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award, and many other honors.; His
recent novel, Evolution, was a New York Times
Notable Book of the Year.

Baxter has degrees in mathematics, from Cambridge

University, and engineering, from Southhampton
University. He lives in Buckinghamshire, England.

Jacket design by Howard Grossman/Design

James Hutton portrait by Gorbis
Author photo by Sandra Shepherd

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 Praise for

ages in chaos
"Hutton more or less invented the earth sciences and the modern
understanding of geology, and laid the foundations for Darwin's work over the
next few decades.... Baxter takes an unwavering and mostly sympathetic
look at his life and ideas."
—Focus

"Baxter, a leading science fiction writer, employs his storytelling

skills to lucid effect in a highly readable biography of a
fascinating, neglected figure."
—Time Out

"Engaging ... [Baxter] sets out the Enlightenment context

of Hutton’s work and lucidly describes his ideas."
—Sunday Times [London]

"Fortunately for biographers, Hutton

lived in exciting times in Scottish history,
witnessing the abortive 1745 rebellion, and
knew many of the Edinburgh Enlightenment
glitterati, such as the chemist Joseph Black
and the engineer James Watt.”
—New Scientist

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