Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
BACKLASH
It was not surprising that there should be a backlash to James Hutton's
Abstract, as it was probably circulated to various learned and scien-
tific circles, such as the Royal Society in London, the Royal Irish
Academy in Dublin and the various academies in major centres of
science such as Uppsala, Stockholm, Berlin and Paris, to name but a
few. Opinion was divided.
One debate centred on the origin and nature of basalt and other
rocks. One body of thought, collectively the 'Neptunists', or to use a
contemporary term 'Watermen', felt that these rocks were precipitates
fromwater - a view held by AbrahamWerner and most of his students
in the Freiberg School of Mines. They regarded lava as being a product
of volcanoes, but basalt as being lithologically quite distinct from it.
They held that where volcanoes occurred in basaltic regions, they had
formed after the basalt had been deposited.
The other group, variably known as 'Vulcanists' or 'Plutonists' or
'Firemen', according to the rock types in which they were interested,
argued that the rocks had once been heated and were the products of
volcanoes or other igneous mechanisms. The Vulcanist theory was
proposed by the Frenchman Nicholas Desmarest (1725-1815), who,
having observed the extinct volcanoes in central France, advocated in
1771 that basalt was the product of volcanic activity. Hutton proposed a
plutonic origin for some igneous rocks, and noted that these were
emplaced from a hot magmatic source from below.
In the British Isles the most vociferous attacks on Hutton and on
Desmarest emanated from Richard Kirwan (1733-1812), an eccentric
Dublin-based gentleman, who continued to advance the ideas pertain-
ing to the biblical Flood. Kirwan was outraged and went into print
defending the Neptunian theory in papers published from 1793 in the
Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy and in his important topic
Geological Essays, published in 1799, two years after Hutton's death.
In publishing his earlier papers he spurred Hutton into producing a full
version of his theory; for this we have to thank Kirwan. In time a great
deal of what Hutton and indeed Desmarest wrote was accepted by
