James Hutton - founder of geology

James Hutton (1726–1797), a Scottish farmer and naturalist, is regarded as the founder of modern geology. Above all. he was a great observer of the world around him, but more importantly, he then proceeded to make carefully reasoned geological arguments from the phenomena that he had observed. As a result of this Hutton came to believe that the Earth was undergoing a perpetual process of formation and destruction; for example, that molten material is forced up into mountains, eroded, and then the sediments are washed away. He also argued that the forces visible in the present day are much the same as they were in the past and that therefore the history of the Earth could be determined by understanding how processes such as erosion and sedimentation work in the present day. These ideas and and his approach to studying the Earth established geology as a proper science.

Short Biography of James Hutton

In the late eighteenth century, during the period that James Hutton was painstakingly examining rocks, it was generally believed that Earth had come into creation six thousand years earlier (on October 22, 4004 B.C., to be precise, according to the seventeenth century scholarly analysis of the Bible by Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland), and that fossils were simply the remains of the animals that had perished during Noah's Biblical flood. As for the structure of the Earth, “natural philosophers” agreed that much bedrock consisted of long, parallel layers which occurred at various angles, and that sediments deposited by water were compressed to form stone. Hutton recognised that this sedimentation process occurs so slowly that even the oldest rocks are made up of “materials furnished from the ruins of former continents.” The reverse process occurs when rock exposed to the atmosphere erodes and decays. He called this coupling of destruction and renewal the “great geological cycle,” and hypothesised that it had been completed innumerable times.




