Hutton, James 1726-97
Scottish geologist

Born in Edinburgh, after a short period as lawyer's apprentice he turned to medicine, which he studied in Edinburgh before going to the Continent to complete his professional training in Paris and Leyden. He never practised medicine, and instead went to Norfolk in 1752 to devote his time to agriculture; it was there that he became interested in geology. In 1754 he moved back to his estate in Berwickshire. He returned to Edinburgh in 1768 and joined an active intellectual group which included Joseph Black, Adam Ferguson, Sir James Hall and John Playfair. Hutton developed his theories about the Earth over a number of years as a result of many journeys into Scotland, England and Wales, and finally presented his ideas before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in A Theory of the Earth (1785; expanded, vols 1 and 2 1795, vol 3 1799). In this he demonstrated that the internal heat of the Earth caused intrusions of molten rock into the crust and that granite was the product of the cooling of molten rock and not the earliest chemical precipitate of the primeval ocean as advocated by Abraham Werner and others. This 'Plutonist' versus 'Neptunist' debate raged on for a considerable time after Hutton's death. His system of the Earth recognized that most rocks were detrital in origin having been produced by erosion from the continents, deposited on the seafloor, lithified by heat from below and then uplifted to form new continents. The cyclicity of such processes led him to envisage an Earth with 'no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end'. These uniformitarian ideas attracted strong opposition from the Swiss geologist Jean Andr� De Luc (1727-1817), William Buckland and associates from the 'English School' of geology, and from Richard Kirwan. Nevertheless, Hutton's ideas held firm to form the basis of modern geology.

Bibliography: E B Bailey, James Hutton: The Founder of Modern Geology (1967)