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In the late 1700s Scotland was basking in the rays of Enlightenment thought. In Edinburgh, which had previously been a dark, squalid and disease-ridden outpost on the edge of Europe, luminaries as diverse as Adam Smith, the founder of economics, Joseph Black, the scientist who discovered carbon dioxide, and David Hume, the great philosopher and historian, emerged.
Yet, despite this Pantheon of formidable thinkers, according to TC Smout: ‘In that great age of intellect none made a more original contribution…to our understanding of the planet’ than a Berwickshire farmer by the name of James Hutton.
Considering the scientific and philosophical heavyweights who graced Edinburgh in this era this is praise indeed, and is made all the more emphatic as it comes from Scotland’s Histographer Royal. Yet, despite Smout’s assertions, few people have heard of Hutton today and it is only recently that his reputation has begun being restored.
When Hutton was born in Edinburgh in 1726, it was into a world that people believed had only been in existence for several millennia – an assumption based on the clergy’s literal interpretation of the scriptures. In 1658, Archbishop James Ussher had calculated that ‘the beginning of time fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October in the year 4004’ and this remarkable figure was included in the English Bible.
Such a theory envisaged Earth and Man as being created at the same time, and this was taken as fact by society at large. Indeed, even the likes of William Shakespeare adhered to this belief – Rosalind in As You Like It exclaims that ‘the poor world is almost 6000 years old.’
Once this figure had been incorporated in established religion, to question it would have amounted to heresy. So, it seems unlikely that Hutton, born into a Christian family, would have doubted this received wisdom in his youth. However, on the death of his father, he abandoned medicine, which he had studied in Edinburgh, Paris and Leyden, and started to oversee work on the family’s Berwickshire farm.
It was to prove a fateful decision, for the young Hutton began to devote his mental powers to questions concerning the soil, the rocks and the landscape – a fascination that was to eventually lead him to one of the 18th century’s most important discoveries.
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