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Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time

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This book gives an accurate assessment of the contributions of James Hutton (1726-1797) to science in general and geology in particular. Baxter gives "deep time" emphasis, but he does this, not by allowing the question of time to dominate the book. The organization of the book serves to elucidate the scientific concept of geologic time, a concept which Hutton jump-started, and delineates how the concept of deep time has evolved to modern day.

New ground and interesting for me is Baxter's treatment of "design arguments" (page 42) stemming all the way back to Aristotle. "Fred Hoyle - the British astrophysicist who unraveled the production of carbon I stars - said in 1959, 'I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequence they produce inside the stars."

Stephen Baxter, the author, is an award-winning science fiction writer and was formerly educated as a physicist and engineer. I am a geologist by training and profession, and initially wondered if Baxter could give an adequate perspective to a work on Hutton. Please let me state to my geological friends that Baxter seems to have assimilated geology very well and shares most or all of our sensibilities. I can only guess that writing science fiction must be wonderful training and preparation for understanding and explaining the history of science and geology. As an example of two areas that satisfied my geologic chauvinism, Baxter pays very close attention to the roles of "field work" and Hutton's rock collection in the development of his scientific conclusions. This was new Hutton territory for me and I found Baxter's treatment fascinating - great book.

One of Baxter's final conclusions concerning Hutton is: "There have been many great geologists, but no figure before or since bequeathed a package of so many profound and integrated insights as James Hutton. And he was the first to construct a model of Earth's history containing its most essential feature, a vast and deep abyss of time."

To reach this conclusion Baxter takes us through a real History of Science lesson, not just Hutton biography, but the biography and contributions of his precursors, teachers, scientific peers, and successors who were impacted, conflicted by, and who supported and elaborated Hutton's work. Baxter is able to do this in 231 pages, and I think it would have been difficult to do it in fewer.

Baxter quotes Stephen Jay Gould: "......though Hutton was a great thinker, he was not a modern thinker. And he has been hugely misunderstood" (page 216). Baxter attempts to place the reader in the historic context in which Hutton lived: "How much harder it was for Hutton in a time when the textbooks had yet to be written!" There is a splendid review of James Ussher, the Irish bishop, that had established the earth's birthday as 22 October, 4004, BC, on a Saturday, at about six in the evening. Although this was established religious dogma at the time of Hutton's youth ".......it was obvious there was something wrong. You didn't even have to look at the rocks to know that." (Baxter, page 23). And, going against the Church was dangerous. Some of Hutton's most vociferous critics decried him as an atheist, in print. In addition to the obvious religious conflicts, Hutton's writing was obscure.

He assumed that the reader was more knowledgeable. "In addition nobody had really understood Hutton's careful epistemology and his uniformitarianism, or his arguments about heat - partly because he hadn't sufficiently explained them in a presentation Playfair called too brief." (Baxter, page 147) "Hutton was endeavoring to produce a complete and consistent body of physical theory and epistemological methodology to support his assertions about the Earth;..."(Baxter, page 177). By separating his observations from his inferences, Hutton was trying to explain the basis on which he derived his hypotheses, and by opening up his methodology for examination he was setting out his thinking as a basis for a true science of geology in the future - for that methodology itself could be improved (Baxter, page 132).

It was almost as if Hutton had two enormous goals: 1) explaining how the earth worked and 2) how to think and reason scientifically about the new unnamed science of geology. It is no wonder that readers had difficulty.

Playfair is well know to all geologists as the translator for Hutton. He was a warm friend and sought to make the significance of Hutton's work understood. He also wrote a biographic sketch of Hutton after his death which Baxter suggests is too idealized. Baxter attempts, I think successfully, to sleuth and flesh out the real man, Hutton, quoting some of his letters which are lively and salty.

Hutton begins university at age fourteen (1740), and studied math under Colin Maclaurin, who had been recommended by Newton. Hutton developed an interest in chemistry in spite of the University of Edinburgh not having a chemistry curriculum. After three years at University he took a position as an apprentice to a solicitor, but this did not work out. Hutton was still interested in chemistry. He went back to the University to study medicine. He met a fellow medical student named John Clerk who was from a prominent Midlothian land and coal mine owning family. Baxter believes that this began Hutton's interest, at age eighteen, in minerals, coal, and rocks (1744). After three years studying medicine at Edinburgh he left to continue his studies abroad. At age 21 he arrived in Paris (1747). "Hutton probably attended Professor Francois Rouelle's lectures on mineralogy in Paris. Rouelle pioneered ideas, concerning the order in which rocks had been laid down....." (Baxter, Page 45). From Paris he went to Leiden to complete his medical training. He wrote a thesis in French entitled, "On the Circulation of Blood in the Microcosm".

Returning to Edinburgh through London at age 23 he struggled with what to do next (1749). Apparently being a physician was not in the cards. He and a friend James Davie began a business producing sal ammoniac which was used in dyes and in the production of tin and brass. It was being imported from Egypt but he and Davie had worked a method to produce it in Scotland from chimney soot collected in Edinburgh.

"But now his life was devastated by scandal." (Baxter, page 58) There is fragmentary evidence of a women, and a son emerges after Hutton's death. The episode was so embarrassing to Hutton that he felt a need to retreat from Edinburgh to two small farm properties of his father's southeast of Edinburgh along the coast in Berwickshire (1752). "The Land was wild and uncultivated, just open fields that backed on to sheep country. Stones had to be split and hauled away before Hutton could work the soil at all" (Baxter, page 64).

Here from age 26 to age 39 farming became his chief occupation. Initially he focused on learning what he could from other farmers that were sucessful. He traveled to and apprenticed under excellent farmers in Norfolk, Yarmouth, and Belton. "He made many journeys - mostly on foot - to different parts of England. He visited Northumberland, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, and the Isle of Wight. These trips were made primarily to study agricultural techniques, but by this time Hutton had also begun to study geology and mineralogy in a more serious way" (Baxter, page 61). "Hutton would later boast that he could tell you where a piece of gravel had come from anywhere on the eastern side of Britain" (Baxter, page, 61).

"Hutton persevered with his farming, and slowly his situation improved. His Norfolk plough transformed the land. As Adam Ferguson noted, 'The joke [of his Norfolk plough] has become serious, and is now the general practice from one end of Scotland to the other.' The farm, once 'very wild and uncultivated piece of land', had a 'degree of neatness and garden-like culture, which in farming had not been seen before. Persons of every description came from every quarter to gratify their intellectual curiosity, as well as to get information' " (Baxter, page 72). With pioneering techniques, he had greatly improved the condition of his land, and his agricultural studies had become the focal point of his interlocking interests in chemistry, meteorology, geology and botany. His achievements showed the quality of his character and his mind" (Baxter, page 80).

Hutton's natural focus on soil must have led to this key intuition:...."the world did not suffer only decay: perhaps it also had the capability for repair" (Baxter, page 76).

"This was Hutton's picture, then: rocks decayed through erosion, the rubble was consolidated into new rocks, and then somehow uplifted to make new lands - erosion, deposition, consolidation, uplift. And cupped in the heart of this immense rocky machine, the priceless soil that sustained life was subtly created" (Baxter, page 78). Arguing with the support of final causes and design arguments Hutton reached this hypothesis. ".....starting from first principles - that the final cause for the Earth is to sustain life - Hutton deduced that it must have some mechanism of repair from erosion, just as Harvey had once deduced the existence of capillaries in the body, then undetected, to complete his model of blood's circulation. The task now was to find that mechanism....." Baxter continues on page 77 quoting Hutton: ' This is the view in which we are now to examine the globe, to see if there be, in the constitution of this world a reproductive operation, by which a ruined constitution may be again repaired, and a duration or stability thus procured to the machine, considered as a world sustaining plants and animals.'

At the age of 41 in 1767 Hutton determined to return to Edinburgh. He build a new home facing the spectacular geology of Salisbury Crags and Arthur's seat for himself and his three sisters. Previously...."He had been elected to a committee which was to supervise the construction of the Forth and Clyde canal" (Baxter, page 79). "It was against the background of the elegant new city, and in the heads of a literate, independent-minded and newly prosperous populace, that the Scottish Enlightenment would bloom, causing Voltaire to say, 'It is to Scotland that we must look for our idea of civilization' (Baxter, page 86).

It was a relief for Hutton to move into his new house on St. John's Hill, his collection was taking up to much space.......Hutton would examine his specimens chemically and under the microscope, and then varnish them to keep them looking bright. He would prune his hoard to focus on the most intellectually valuable samples" (Baxter, page 97).

This era was know as the Scottish Enlightenment. Many of the most famous men were personal acquaintances or good friends of James Hutton. The David Hume family farm was near Hutton's farm. Joseph Black, Adam Smith, and James Watt were personal friends. Hutton visited with Erasmus Darwin, grandfather to Charles Darwin. And Hutton attracted and mentored younger talents such as Sir James Hall and John Playfair. These men met and shared their scientific theories at the Philosophical Society and at gentleman's clubs such the Poker Club. Large volumes of Claret were also imbibed.

As previously mentioned Hutton began a tradition of field work and travel with his agricultural studies. He went back to the low countries in 1754. In 1764 he traveled to the Scottish highlands with George Clerk-Maxwell where Hutton compiled notes, observations, and reflections on the geology. In 1774 made a long trip to Birmingham, Wales, Anglesey, Wiltshire, Bath, Warwickshire, and Derbyshire. "....as early as 1764 his forays into the field had become directed and specific, as he sought evidence to support his arguments" (Baxter, page 116). "In Wales he mostly had to ride on horseback, and his backside took a good deal of punishment: during this forty-day tour his riding breeches would wear out four times" (Baxter, page 111). In 1779 he went to Shropshire to climb Wrekin. In 1785 he went to Glen Tilt. In 1787 he went to Arran to search for his concept of an unconformity with, marginal results. Later in 1787 he discovered his first clear unconformity at Jedburgh, by serendipity in the "borders region" of Scotland. And finally by a directed effort from the sea to the coast he discovered at Siccar Point, a clear cut example of an unconformity. On that day he was accompanied in the field by John Playfair and Sir John Hall. What better way to make permanent disciples. Baxter quotes from Playfair: "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of those wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow."

Baxter does a masterful job of piecing together the rest of the story, and at the same time putting it into historical context. This includes the oral presentation in 1785 and print version in 1788 and book version of Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1795 and the blistering attacks which followed. "Hutton knew he had to defend himself. Even more so then in 1785, Britain in 1793 was not a good place to be called a heretic" (Baxter, page 174).

"By now most European geologists were divided into two camps, neither of which had been influenced much by Hutton's theories. The 'Vulcanists', including Desmarest and Faujas, were fire geologists, who believed that volcanoes must have had significant effects on the evolution of the Earth. The other school was the Neptunists, who thought volcanoes were irrelevant special effects. To them water was the key agent . All Neptunists hypothesized some kind of universal ocean, out of which the rocks had been deposited. But there was still a whole spectrum of theologically inclined thinkers, ranging from those who still held to the most literal interpretation of the Bible account, to others who interpreted its teaching in a more symbolic or allegorical way" (Baxter, page 165-166).

On a Saturday in March 1797 James Hutton died. "Essential or not, Hutton's huge work was almost universally ignored by learned society, then and since. Even his closest friend, Black, wouldn't buy a word of it" (Baxter, page 168). These words by Playfair serve as a memorial: "With [Hutton's] relish for what ever is beautiful and sublime in science, we may easily conceive what pleasure he derived from his own geological speculations. The novelty and grandeur of the objects offered by them to the imagination, the simple and uniform order given to the whole natural history of the Earth, and, above all, the views opened of the wisdom that governs nature, are things to which hardly any man could be insensible, but to him they were matter, not of transient delight, but of solid and permanent happiness....No author was ever more disposed to consider the enjoyment of them, as the full and adequate reward of his labours" (Baxter, page 185).

Baxter continues with the history of the conflicts among the Vulcanists, Neptunists, Catatastrophists, and Uniformitarianists and the development of the concept of geologic time. By and large Hutton's team wins but the men he mentored, John Playfair, and Sir James Hall led the way by clarifying communication, updating, and finishing the science. "In 1824, aged sixty-three Hall accompanied yet another keen young geologist on a repeat of Hutton's classic expedition to Siccar Point. The youngster was much impressed - and, a quarter of a century after Hutton's death, it was to him that the responsibility for the next stage of the argument would devolve. ....... His name was Charles Lyell" (Baxter, page 203).

Baxter abstracts the rest of the story, carrying on with Lyell, Darwin, Kelvin, Rutherford, and Holmes to near present day. This neat and concise volume gives us an excellent introduction to James Hutton and how he almost single-handedly turned the study of the earth into a science called geology; and gave us a way of fruitfully thinking about and making sense of the Earth.

This is a very, very good book -- its combination of Hutton's philosophy of knowledge with his theory of the Earth is a great step in the right direction -- the first in a popular book cencerning Hutton. It aslo places Hutton in his intellectual millieu really well.