A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



penetration to see that the phantom science of geology 

 needed before all else a body corporeal, and who took 

 to himself the task of supplying it. This was Dr. James 

 Hutton, of Edinburgh, physician, farmer, and manu- 

 facturing chemist patient, enthusiastic, level-headed 

 devotee of science. Inspired by his love of chemistry 

 to study the character of rocks and soils, Hutton had 

 not gone far before the earth stood revealed to him in 

 a new light. He saw, what generations of predecessors 

 had blindly refused to see, that the face of nature every- 

 where, instead of being rigid and immutable, is peren- 

 nially plastic, and year by year is undergoing meta- 

 morphic changes. The solidest rocks are day by day 

 disintegrated slowly, but none the less surely, by wind 

 and rain and frost, by mechanical attrition and chem- 

 ical decomposition, to form the pulverized earth and 

 clay. This soil is being swept away by perennial show- 

 ers, and carried off to the oceans. The oceans them- 

 selves beat on their shores, and eat insidiously into the 

 structure of sands and rocks. Everywhere, slowly but 

 surely, the surface of the land is being worn away ; its 

 substance is being carried to burial in the seas. 



Should this denudation continue long enough, thinks 

 Hutton, the entire surface of the continents must be 

 worn away. Should it be continued long enough ! And 

 with that thought there flashes on his mind an inspir- 

 ing conception the idea that solar time is long, in- 

 definitely long. That seems a simple enough thought 

 almost a truism to the twentieth - century mind; 

 but it required genius to conceive it in the eighteenth. 

 Hutton pondered it, grasped its full import, and made 

 it the basis of his hypothesis, his " theory of the earth." 



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