Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER THREE
James Hutton's Theory
of the Earth: A Machine
without a History
Picturing the Abyss of Time
The world is so complex, and the skills needed to apprehend it so varied, that
even the greatest of intellects often needs a partner to supply an absent skill.
As many of history's great lovers secured deputies to match physical
appearance with the beauty of their poetry (the tragedy of Cyrano, among
others), some scientists have needed a Boswell to present brilliant ideas in
comprehensible form. James Hutton, whose
Theory of the Earth
(1795)
marks the conventional discovery of deep time in British geological thought,
might have occupied but a footnote to history if his unreadable treatise had
not been epitomized by his friend, and brilliant prose stylist, John Playfair, in
Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth
(1802).
In a familiar literary passage, Playfair described a great geological discovery
that Hutton had showed him in 1788—not a thing so much as an
interpretation. Hutton had recognized what we now call an unconformity as
the most dramatic field evidence for time's vastness. Playfair described a
phenomenon that Hutton would later depict in one of the few illustrations of
his treatise, valued and reproduced ever since as a turning point in human
knowledge. (It is, for example, the frontispiece both to this chapter—Figure
3.1— and to John McPhee's
Basin and Range
):
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