Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe. [Bound with:] PLAYFAIR, John. Biographical Account of James Hutton, M.D. F.R.S. Ed. [And:] WATT, Gregory. Observations on Basalt, and on the Transition from the Vitreous to the Stony Texture, which occurs in the gradual Refrigeration of melted Basalt; with some Geological Remarks. [And:] HALL, Sir James. Account of a Series of Experiments, shewing the Effects of Compression in modifying the Action of Heat. [And:] BEDDOES, Thomas. Observations on the Affinity between Basaltes and Granite

From the Library of James Watt. First edition, the rare offprint in which Hutton's theory of the earth first circulated in his own words, and James Watt's copy, bound for the Watts with four further tracts of the Huttonian controversy under the label Tracts Geological, 1785 to 1805. The paper, read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 7 March and 4 April 1785, found in the rocks no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end. It made the surface of the earth the product of forces still at work, acting through a span of time beyond human reckoning. Hutton sent the separately issued paper to his friends before the first volume of the Society's Transactions appeared in 1788; this is the form in which the theory was first read outside Edinburgh. The four tracts bound with it, in the order the Watts chose, the memoir first and the theory second, begin with the account of Hutton's life that Playfair read to the Society in 1803. Then follow Gregory Watt's paper on the slow cooling of melted basalt (1804) and Hall's account of the compression experiments that put Hutton's subterranean heat to the test (1805). The last is Beddoes's paper on the kinship of basalt and granite (1791), an author's presentation copy to the Manchester radical Thomas Cooper. Between them the five tracts hold the theory, an early defence of it by another hand, its two experimental vindications, and the life of its author. They were gathered within twenty years of the first reading by the one household that stood in both of the theory's worlds, the Edinburgh of Black, Playfair and Hall and the Birmingham of Boulton, Wedgwood, Beddoes and Davy. Provenance: James Watt (1736-1819), for whose household the five tracts were bound after 1805 under the spine label Tracts Geological, 1785 to 1805; his son James Watt junior (1769-1848), who preserved his father's library and papers and whose own friendships account for the fifth tract; the Gibson-Watts, to whom the volume descended in the family, with whose library it was moved from Heathfield to Doldowlod in the 1870s; Geoffrey Walton (1939-2025), mining geologist and historian of geology, with his pictorial bookplate on the front pastedown. The elder Watt had come to know Hutton through Joseph Black, and the two were friends from the 1770s, their surviving letters, seven from Hutton and four from Watt, running from 1774 to 1795. It was probably through Watt that Hutton was introduced, on his tour of England and Wales in 1774, to the Birmingham circle that would be called the Lunar Society, and he afterwards corresponded with Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin; the traffic in ideas ran both ways, and David Philip Miller has suggested that Hutton's picture of the earth as a heat engine, wearing itself down and building itself up again, owed something to what he saw of Watt's engines. Watt's copies reached Birmingham in the summer of 1787. The earliest firm evidence of the offprint in anyone's hands is a pair of letters that Dennis Dean brought to notice: on 25 August 1787 Josiah Wedgwood wrote to Watt that his son would shortly deliver two copies of the Theory of the Earth, one for Watt and one for Boulton, which Hutton had sent south with the younger Wedgwood, and within the week Black wrote to Princess Dashkova at St Petersburg to set out Hutton's new theory at length, ending that the paper Hutton had published was but a specimen and that he was preparing a larger work. Watt's library also held Hutton's 1785 Abstract, inscribed by the author, and a second offprint of the Theory in another volume of pamphlets; which of the two offprints is the copy the younger Wedgwood carried south cannot now be told, and the present volume is the one in which the family kept the argument together. Playfair, for his part, sent Watt an inscribed copy of the biography as well, which survives separately in its blue wrappers, titled in ink on the cover by Watt; the copy bound here is the second that the Watts owned. Hutton's theory.…