Hutton’s theory. 
63 
water. By the application of a heat sufficiently intense, earthy 
bodies are fused. On cooling they harden, and if the refrigera¬ 
tion be very slow, many of them will exhibit more or less of a 
crystalline structure. If immersed in wafer they are dissolved to 
some extent, or if they are in fine powder they remain suspended 
in the water, and when this is evaporated, consolidation and crys¬ 
tallization takes place as before. Werner, as we have seen, 
attributed the great changes the earth has undergone to the agency 
of water. Hutton allowed that water had been active in produc¬ 
ing changes upon the surface of the globe, but with him the great 
efficient agent that gave the rocks their structure and form, was7?re. 
H utton first remarked, that the mountains and hills are contin¬ 
ually wasted by the action of the elements. Their highest peaks 
are abraded by storms, the finer particles are carried to a distance 
by the torrents that rush down their sides, and the larger deposited 
at their bases. This process will continue to go on, until the 
whole mass of the existing continents shall have been carried 
down to the ocean, over the bottom of which the earthy matter 
will, by the rolling of the waves and the currents that prevail 
there, be distributed. 
In this situation the mineral beds will be fused, and elevated by 
the action of an internal fire. What is now the bottom of the sea 
will become dry land, and the waves will roll over countries that 
have once been the dw'elling place of men. Such revolutions 
Hutton asserted have more than once changed the face of the 
globe, and that they will be indefinitely repeated hereafter. 
The Wernerians objected to these doctrines, the existence of 
carbonate of lime amongst all classes of rocks. This substance is 
converted into quicklime, by tbe escape of its carbonic acid when 
strongly heated. Sir James Hall, the intimate friend of Hutton, 
undertook to relieve his theory from a part of the difficulties under 
which it laboured, by exposing carbonate of lime and other sub¬ 
stances to heat under pressure, for it was under pressure— 
weighed down by an immense superincumbent load, that the 
existing mountains were fused and consolidated. He found that 
in such circumstances carbonate of lime may be fused and made 
to assume a crystalline structure, without parting with its acid, 
and that the appearance of various substances is very different, as 
after having been intensely heated they are rapidly or slowly 
cooled. 
There was further objected to Hutton, the immense number of 
ages it must take to wear down the largest mountain ranges formed 
of very refratftory and imperishable materials. In some favourable 
situations the disintegration of the rocks proceeds rapidly, but in 
others the progress of the work is inconceivably slow. The pil¬ 
lars and statuary of the Parthenon at Athens, have lost hardly any 
of the sharpness of tbe angles produced by the original chiseling, 
after a lapse of more than two thousand years. The graves of the 
aborignal Britons still exhibit themselves, rising distinctly above 
