Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
some of Hutton's ideas were not simply a 'road to Damascus' sponta-
neous revelation, but must have been a conscious or subconscious
reworking and reformulation of earlier ideas, largely those of Hooke,
to which he added considerable insights and observations of his own,
formed while engaged in field work and travel.
As well as his travels in England in the 1750s and on the
Continent, Hutton went on a long tour of the north of Scotland in
1764 in the company of his close friend George Clerk, later Clerk
Maxwell (1713-1784). In 1774 he toured England and Wales when a
visit to the salt mines in Cheshire with James Watt (1736-1819) made
a considerable impression. Hutton was interested in the quartzose
gravel which underlies much of Birmingham, and visited Wales to try
to discover the source of this material. In doing this, he demonstrated
his early appreciation of the role of denudation in the formation of later
sediments, and thus later geological horizons. He was unsuccessful in
finding the source of the sediment until he returned to Birmingham
where he found a suitable lithology locally. In 1777 Hutton published a
short paper that contrasted and compared the coal successions in
Scotland with those found in England, and it was largely thanks to
this work that the Scottish coal producers were exempt from paying
government duty so long as the fuel was transported to its destination
by sea. Hutton also examined the structure of Arthur's Seat in
Edinburgh and published a paper on the subject in the Transactions of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It seems that he read several papers to
the Royal Society but failed to publish them - he tended to be reluctant
to go to press with new information, and much of his work was pub-
lished thanks to generous encouragement fromhis friends, or as a result
of opinions voiced by those who disagreed with his theories.
HUTTON'S THEORY OF 1785
Following about thirty years of study and occasional travel, Hutton
was ready to launch his theories on to the world stage. On 7 March
1785, the date that the first part of his work was read to the assembled
Fellows of the Physical Class of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
