James Hutton

James Hutton was born on 3 June 1726 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and died there on 26 March 1797. He studied classics at the University of Edinburgh, apprenticed briefly as a lawyer, then turned to medicine, earning a doctorate from Leiden University in 1749. He went on to run a profitable chemical works producing sal ammoniac and to manage farms he had inherited in Berwickshire, work that gave him years of direct field observation of soil, rock and erosion. From 1767 to 1774 he contributed geological expertise to the construction of the Forth and Clyde canal, and in 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He presented his Theory of the Earth orally to that Society on 7 March and 4 April 1785, arguing that the same slow, ordinary processes still observable today, deposition, erosion, uplift and heat, had shaped the Earth over spans of time far longer than commonly assumed, famously concluding that the geological record showed no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. The paper was published in the Society's Transactions in 1788, and Hutton expanded it into a two volume book, Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, in 1795. He is widely called the father of modern geology, and the view that Earth's history can be read from processes still operating in the present became known as uniformitarianism.