THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



jected to the action of heat. Marble, for example, is 

 clearly nothing but calcined limestone. 



With such evidence before him, Hutton is at no loss 

 to complete his hypothesis. The agency which has solid- 

 ified the ocean-beds, he says, is subterranean heat. The 

 same agency, acting excessively, has produced volcanic 

 cataclysms, upheaving ocean-beds to form continents. 

 The rugged and uneven surfaces of mountains, the tilted 

 and broken character of stratified rocks everywhere, are 

 the standing witnesses of these gigantic upheavals. 



And with this the imagined cycle is complete. The 

 continents, worn away and carried to the sea by the action 

 of the elements, have been made over into rocks again 

 in the ocean-beds, and then raised once more into conti- 

 nents. And this massive cycle, in Button's scheme, is 

 supposed to have occurred not once only, but over and 

 over again, times without number. In this unique view 

 ours is indeed a world without beginning and without 

 end ; its continents have been making and unmaking in 

 endless series since time began. 



Hutton formulated his hypothesis while yet a young 

 man, not long after the middle of the century. He 

 first gave it publicity in 1781, in a paper before the 

 Royal Society of Edinburgh, a paper which at the mo- 

 ment neither friend nor foe deigned to notice. It was 

 not published in book form till the last decade of the 

 century, when Hutton had lived with and worked over 

 his theory for almost fifty years. Then it caught the 

 eye of the world. A school of followers expounded the 

 Huttonian doctrines; a rival school, under Werner, in 

 Germany, opposed some details of the hypothesis ; and 

 the educated world as a whole viewed disputants 

 askance. The very novelty of the new views forbade their 



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