Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The best biography of Giovanni Arduino available is the comprehensive
volume by Ezio Vaccari: Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795): il contributo di uno
scienziato veneto al dibattito settcentesco sulle scienze della Terra (Firenze: Leo
S. Olschki, 1993). A translation into English of this scholarly work is urgently
needed. For a discussion of Bergman's ideas on stratigraphy, see the paper by
H. D. Hedberg, 'The influence of Torbern Bergman (1735-1784) on stratigraphy:
a resum´ ', in Schneer, Toward a History of Geology (1969), pp. 186-191. In the
same volume, pp. 242-256, Alexander M. Ospovat gives a detailed exegesis of
Werner's stratigraphical classification in 'Reflections on A. G. Werner's ''Kurze
Klassifikation'' '. Mott T. Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing
Views of a Changing World (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1982)
devotes much of one chapter to a discussion of Werner's ideas. Werner's quote on
the endless span of geological time is from A. G. Werner, Short Classification and
Description of the Various Rocks. Translation of the German Text of 1786 by
Alexander Ospovat (New York: Hafner, 1971) and also reproduced in Claude C.
Albritton Jr, 'Geologic Time', Journal of Geological Education 32 (1984), 29-37.
Chapter 6. An infinite and cyclical Earth and religious orthodoxy
A great deal has been written on James Hutton and his theory, starting with
John Playfair's Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, published in
Edinburgh in 1802. This edition was reprinted by Dover Books in 1956. Playfair also
produced an early biographical account that was published in the Transactions of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1805. It too has been reissued, in George W.
White (ed.) Contributions to the History of Geology, Vol. 5 (Connecticut: Hafner
Publishing Company, 1970), and more recently, in 1997, by the RSE Scotland
Foundation. The drawings sketched by John Clerk and others while on field work
with Hutton were discovered in 1968 and reproduced in a fine slipcase that was
accompanied by an explanatory book by Gordon Craig, Donald McIntyre and
Charles Waterston, James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: The Lost Drawings
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978). Donald McIntyre has produced a
large canon of work on Hutton that includes a comprehensive paper on his
Edinburgh circle published in Earth Sciences History 16, part 2 (1997), 100-157 (a
pre´cis of this paper was published in the volume that emanated from the James
Hutton bicentenary conference held in Edinburgh: G. Y. Craig and J. H. Hull (eds.),
James Hutton - Present and Future (London: Geological Society Special Publication
150, 1999)), and a booklet co-authored with Alan McKirdy, James Hutton: The
Founder of Modern Geology (London: The Stationery Office, 1997). Interesting
details of Hutton's Edinburgh house are given by Norman Butcher, 'James
