Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of sorting out to do, and not all of it went smoothly. From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laid down, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put...
Lyell's oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Louis Agassiz's idea of ice agesthe refrigeration of the globe, as he di...
Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of many provocative pamphlets with titles like Revolution without Bloodshed. In 1794, he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy called the Pop-gun Plot, i...
Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little stone-breaking, as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in...
The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing fieldwork. These weren't people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simp...
Luckily Hutton had a Boswell in the form of John Playfair, a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and a close friend, who could not only write silken prose butthanks to many years at Hutton's elbowactually understood what Hutton wa...
In 1785, Hutton worked his ideas up into a long paper, which was read at consecutive meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It attracted almost no notice at all. It's not hard to see why. Here, in part, is how he presented it to his audience: 17...
It was while puzzling over these matters that Hutton had a series of exceptional insights. From looking at his own farmland, he could see that soil was created by the erosion of rocks and that particles of this soil were continually washed away and c...
Among the questions that attracted interest in that fanatically inquisitive age was one that had puzzled people for a very long timenamely, why ancient clamshells and other marine fossils were so often found on mountaintops. How on earth did they get...
Yet almost singlehandedly, and quite brilliantly, he created the science of geology and transformed our understanding of the Earth. Hutton was born in 1726 into a prosperous Scottish family, and enjoyed the sort of material comfort that allowed him t...
