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The last sentence of this quotation is particularly revealing. Hutton argues
that if we find, within fossil species, varieties unknown among living forms,
these varieties are probably not distinctively ancient, but merely as yet
undiscovered among living creatures. This choice between competing
hypotheses, made by preference and without evidence, shows that
alternatives to Hutton's belief in constancy were debated in his time—and
that his denial of history is an active preference, not a simple citation of
contemporary consensus.
In the one passage where Hutton dares not deny distinctive difference in
time, he manages to bypass the subject completely, using another aspect of
the tale to support time's cycle. Hutton does not argue that human life has
pervaded time, but admits the scriptural tradition of recent origin. He simply
acknowledges our late appearance in a sentence, then immediately moves on
to extolling other fossils as indicators of deep time:
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. 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. (1788, 217)
Hutton on strata
Reading Hutton's chapter on unconformities (1795,1, ch. 6) must be an
unnerving experience for any geologist (though few have ever dipped into the
original text). Hutton does everything that any good field geologist would do:
he maps, he traces beds, he studies sequences in superposition. He talks about
primary and secondary strata as older and younger, using their difference in
time (and their separation by an unconformity) as evidence of process. He
presents his descriptions as historical sequences. Writing, for
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