Illustration of Earth cycles

1785 Earth cycles

The book of science

Tom Sharp

James Hutton geology Illustration of Earth cycles

Earth cycles

In his Theory of the Earth, or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution, and restoration of the land upon the globe, James Hutton proposed that rock formations that he observed in pits and cliffs had been consolidated “at the bottom of the sea” and lifted up “to the stations in which they now remain” and that “while the present land was forming” “the former land maintained plants and animals” “in a similar manner as it is at present.”

Hutton’s unconformity

The men of the Scottish Enlightenment were encouraged to search for the material evidence of their theories. Hutton’s theories were not constrained by cultural perception or religious teaching. At Inchbonny, Jedburg, and an eroded outcrop at Siccor Point clearly the greywacke at the bottom of the cliff tilts almost vertically and is capped by a layer of conglomerate and horizontal layers of Old Red Sandstone.

Endless cycles

The human mind generally fails to accept the infinite material universe, but must imagine its beginning and end. Yet James Hutton concluded “that we find no vestige of a beginning —no prospect of an end.”

James Hutton is known as the father of geology. The first geologists, including James Hutton and James Hall, boosted by the empiricism of the Scottish Enlightenment, presented the first challenge to the orthodox religious teaching. Hutton read his Theory of the earth before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785. Hutton was the Plutonist (a catastrophic geologist) who proposed the principle of uniformitarianism to argue against Neptunism (also catastrophic geology). Carried to its logical conclusion, uniformitarianism overthrew all of catastophism, culminating in 1830 with the publication of Principles of geology by Charles Lyell.

In 1669, Nicolas Steno was the first person to declare that fossils didn’t grow in rocks, but he gave up his scientific pursuits to join the Catholic church and become a priest.

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