![]() ![]() ![]() Hutton's theory of the Earth, first given in public that evening in 1785 and then worked up into three volumes in the 1790s, held that the planet was in a state of continuous change. "Lord pity the arse that's clagged to a head that will hunt stones", he wrote from Bath in 1774. In 1767, having made money from a sal ammoniac works, he moved with his sisters to a house on St John's Hill in Edinburgh with a view of the spectacular Salisbury Crags, but continued to criss-cross England and Scotland to examine geological strata and outcroppings. He never practised as a doctor, but farmed in Norfolk and Berwickshire, where he became interested in geology. ![]() Humanity thus lived and died in a space and chronology reserved for its convenience and edification until March 7 1785, when the chemist Joseph Black, deputising for his reticent friend James Hutton, addressed the brand-new Royal Society of Edinburgh: "The purpose of this dissertation is to form some estimate with regard to the time the globe of this Earth has existed, as a world maintaining plants and animals." The answer was a very long time indeed, longer than man or scripture could measure.īorn in Edinburgh in 1726, son of a sometime town councillor, Hutton studied medicine at the town's college. ![]()
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