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example, about lower and upper units separated by an unconformity: "Here
we further learn, that the indurated and erected strata, after being broken and
washed by the moving waters [during formation of the unconformity], had
again been sunk below the sea, and had served as a bottom or basis on which
to form a new structure of strata" (1795, I, 449).
Yet Hutton's interpretations are decidedly peculiar, when judged against long
traditions of field study from his own day through ours. These historical data
are never cited as narrative. Through the thousand pages of Hutton's treatise,
we find not a single sentence that treats the different ages and properties of
strata as interesting in themselves—as markers of distinction for particular
times. Never even the most basic statement that at some particular time, some
definite environment led to the deposition of this kind of rock in that specific
place. We learn instead that recognizable, temporally ordered strata affirm a
general theory of time's cycle and the world machine: "By thus admitting a
primary and secondary in the formation of our land, the present theory will
be confirmed in all its parts. For, nothing but those vicissitudes, in which the
old is worn and destroyed, and new land formed to supply its place, can
explain that order which is to be perceived in all the works of nature" (1795,
I, 471-472).
The earlier treatise of 1788 is even more explicit in rejecting narrative.
Hutton states that our gut-level interest in "the oldest" is undermined by
time's cycle, for we recognize that the bottom of a stratigraphic pile is
sediment derived from older continents, and so forth to a beginning without
vestige:
We are now to take a very general view of nature, without descending into
those particulars which so often occupy the speculations of naturalists, about
the present state of things. 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. (1788, 288)
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