iv Hutton on Degradation of the Land 1 79 



and it embraced also a marvellously broad yet minute 

 survey of the present. From his early youth he had 

 been struck with the evidence of incessant decay upon 

 the surface of the dry land. With admirable insight he 

 kept hold of this cardinal fact, and followed it fearlessly 

 from mountain-top to sea-shore. Wherever we may go, 

 on each variety of rock, in every kind of climate, the 

 doom of dissolution seemed to him to be written in in- 

 effaceable characters upon the whole surface of the dry 

 land. No sooner was the bed of the ocean heaved up 

 into mountains, than the new terrestrial surface began to 

 be attacked. Chemical and mechanical agents were recog- 

 nized as concerned in this disintegration, though the 

 precise nature and extent of their several operations had 

 not then been studied. The general result produced by 

 them, however, was never appreciated by any observer 

 more clearly than by Hutton. From the coast, worn into 

 stack and skerry and cave, by the ceaseless grinding of 

 the waves, he had followed the progress of corrosion up 

 to the crests of his Scottish hills. No rock, even the 

 hardest, could escape, though some resisted more stubbornly 

 than others. 



The universality of this terrestrial waste had been more 

 or less distinctly perceived by previous writers. But 

 Hutton saw a meaning in it which no one before him had 

 suspected. To his eye, while the whole land undergoes 

 loss, it is along certain lines traced by running water that 

 this loss reaches its greatest amount. In the channels of 

 the streams that carry off the drainage of the land he 

 recognized the results of a constant erosion of the rocks 

 by the water flowing over them. As the generalization 



