Charles Schuchert — Historical Geology, 1818-1918. 49 



geologist that Germany has produced," after two years 

 spent in Norway was satisfied "that the rocks in the 

 Christiania district could not be arranged according to 

 the Wernerian plan, which there completely broke down. 

 Von Buch found a mass of granite lying among 

 fossiliferous limestones which were manifestly meta- 

 morphosed, and were pierced by veins of granite, por- 

 phyry, and syenite." Even so, he was not ready to 

 abandon the teachings of his master. After a study 

 of the mountain systems of Germany, however, "he 

 declared that the more elevated mountains had never 

 been covered by the sea, as Werner had taught, but were 

 produced by successive ruptures and uplifts of the ter- 

 restrial crust" (Geikie). 



Rise of Geology and Conformism. — Modern geology 

 has its rise in James Hutton (1726-1797) of Edinburgh, 

 Scotland. In 1785 and 1795, Hutton published his 

 Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations. His 

 "immortal theory" is his only work on geology. "For- 

 tunately for Hutton 's fame and for the onward march of 

 geology, the philosopher numbered among his friends the 

 illustrious mathematician and natural philosopher, John 

 Playfair (1748-1819), who had been closely associated 

 with him in his later years, and was intimately con- 

 versant with his geological opinions." In 1802, Play- 

 fair published his 111 astrations of the Huttonian Theory 

 of the Earth, of which Geikie says, "Of this great classic 

 it is impossible to speak too highly," as it is at the basis 

 of all modern geology. 



One of Hutton 's fundamental doctrines is that the 

 earth is internally hot and that in the past large masses 

 of molten material, the granites, have been intruded into 

 the crust. It was these igneous views that led to his 

 followers being called the Plutonists. Another of his 

 great doctrines was that "the ruins of an earlier world 

 lie beneath the secondary strata," and that they are sep- 

 arated by what is now known as unconformity. He 

 clearly recognized a lost interval in the broken relation 

 of the structures, and that the ruins, the detrital mate- 

 rials, of one world after another are superposed in the 

 structure of the earth. 



Hutton also held that the deformation of once horizon- 

 tally deposited strata was probably brought about at dif- 

 ferent periods by great convulsions that shook the very 



