Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution, and restoration of land upon the globe. Read March 7 and April 4 1785. Offprint from: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. I.

HUTTON, James

Edité par J. Dickson for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, [Edinburgh, 1787

A propos de cet article

The Foundation of Modern Geology. First edition, extremely rare offprint from the family of the great Scottish mathematician James Stirling (1692-1770), of the epoch-making Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe, read at two meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 7 March and 4 April 1785 and published in Part II of Volume I of the Transactions (Edinburgh: J. Dickson, 1788), pp. 209-304, with two engraved plates. In this paper Hutton lays the foundations of uniformitarianism, the doctrine that the earth's surface is the continuous product of natural forces still operating today - the idea whose acceptance, through Lyell and Darwin, would transform the natural sciences of the nineteenth century. This copy of the offprint is bound after John Whitehurst's An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London: for the author, 1778). RBH lists only the Norman-Freilich copy (Christie's New York, 15 June 1998, lot 540, $36,800; resold Sotheby's New York, 10 January 2001, lot 259, $28,350). A further copy, in a sammelband from James Watt's library, was sold by Sotheby's in 2003. Library Hub locates copies at the British Library, the Bodleian, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the National Library of Scotland. Hutton's fundamental conception, now accepted as a matter of course but then entirely new, was that the formation of the surface of the earth is one continuous process which can be studied entirely from terrestrial materials, without cosmological or supernatural intervention. His discussion of the erosion of land surfaces by the atmospheric, chemical, and mechanical action of water, together with his central principle that small changes acting over immense periods of time produce gigantic transformations, had far-reaching consequences in their influence on Charles Lyell and, through Lyell, on Darwin. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography calls his cyclical view of geological processes "a principle now accepted as axiomatic." The revolutionary nature of Hutton's system lay equally in its rejection of the catastrophic view of geological evolution, in its cyclical view of earth history, and in its insistence that the materials of the earth itself - not revelation, not cosmogony - constitute the adequate testimony to a continuous and uniform process of change. His methodology was of nearly equal importance to the development of geology: the examination of rocks in their structural relations, attention to their mineralogical and chemical composition, and close study of the physical processes now operating on the earth's surface as the key to the past and an indication of the future course of events. Hutton was the first field geologist in the modern sense. James Hutton (1726-1797) was born in Edinburgh on 3 June 1726. At fourteen he entered Edinburgh University to study humanities and medicine; he studied chemistry and anatomy in Paris, and took his medical degree at Leyden in 1749 with a thesis on the circulation of the blood. In 1750 he inherited and worked two farms in the Scottish Borders, travelling to Norfolk and Flanders to learn new methods of husbandry and applying them on his own land. It was on his farms, through direct observation of erosion and sediment deposition, that his geological interests took shape. After a decade of successful farming he returned to Edinburgh in 1767, where with Joseph Black he established a successful sal ammoniac manufactory that provided him a steady income and the leisure to pursue his geological work. In 1777 he published a small pamphlet, Considerations on the Nature, Quality, and Distinctions of Coal and Culm, a commercial rather than geological piece arguing that the low-grade stony coal exported from Edinburgh for lime-burning should qualify for a lower rate of duty - a document that, together with his involvement in the Forth and Clyde Canal, indicates the practical recognition.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution, and restoration of land upon the globe. Read March 7 and April 4 1785. Offprint from: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. I.
• Éditeur: J. Dickson for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, [Edinburgh
• Date de parution: 1787
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• Édition: First edition.
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Printing and the Mind of Man
  • Natural History, Geology