Geologist, chemist and naturalist, b. 3 June 1726 (Edinburgh, Scotland), d. 26 May 1797 (Edinburgh).
Jmes Hutton's father, a merchant and office holder of the city of Edinburgh, died when his son was still young, but Hutton managed to obtain a good education in the local grammar school and could go on to study at the University of Edinburgh. Although his main interest was chemistry he decided to enrol in law as a more promising means of securing a future.
In his first year as a lawyer's apprentice it soon became obvious that Hutton would not make a good lawyer - he is reported to have spent more time entertaining his fellow apprentices with chemical experiments than with the copying of legal proceedings.
Within less than a year Hutton left the apprenticeship to study medicine, which promised both an association with chemistry and a secure income. After studies in Edinburgh and Paris he received his M.D. degree in Holland in 1749.
Since the time of his law apprenticeship Hutton had collaborated with his friend James Davie in attempts to produce sal ammoniac from coal soot. Their experiments eventually turned into an inexpensive method of industrial manufacture, and Hutton could leave medicine and buy a farm. By 1765 the farm and the sal ammoniac company were going well, and in 1768 Hutton could retire from both and set himself up in Edinburgh as a private scientist. He devoted the next decade to surveying the literature and travelling to places of geological and chemical interest.
In 1785 Hutton presented several papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in which he developed what William Whewell in 1832 named the uniformitarian principle: that the geological state of the Earth is the result of the same processes that can still be observed today, that these processes lead to very slow changes of the face of the Earth, and that as a consequence the Earth must be of inconceivably great age. Two of the papers appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh under the title "Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe" in 1788.
In Hutton's days geology still accepted the biblical estimate of about 6,000 years for the age of the Earth, so Hutton's ideas were nothing less but revolutionary. Hutton proposed that the destruction of continents through erosion and the formation of new land form a continuous cycle and that the Earth had gone through this cycle many times during its history. In 1795 he published his theory and supportive evidence in two volumes of Theory of the Earth. A third volume was under preparation at his death.
Hutton's ability of scientific analysis was not matched by a lucid writing style, and it took another seven years until his friend John Playfair published a more comprehensible account of his ideas as Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth in 1802. Playfair's work established the basis on which geology could proceed as an accepted branch of science.
James Hutton. Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed. (1995)