James Hutton ( ; June 3, 1726 - March 26, 1797) was a geologist, physician, chemical manufacturer, naturalist, and experimental agricultural expert from Scotland. He derived the theory of uniformitarianism - the basic principle of geology - which explains the features of the earth's crust by means of natural processes during geological time. Hutton's work establishes geology as a science, and as a result he is referred to as "The Father of Modern Geology".
Through careful geological observations and arguments, Hutton became convinced that the Earth was constantly being formed; he admits that Earth's history can be determined by understanding how processes such as erosion and sedimentation work in the present. Geological theory and geological time, also called deep time, are then incorporated into a theory called plutonism and uniformitarianism. Some of his writings anticipate the Gaia hypothesis.
Video James Hutton
Early life and career
Hutton was born in Edinburgh on June 3, 1726, OS one of five children from Sarah Balfour and William Hutton, a merchant who is the Edinburgh City Treasurer. Hutton's father died in 1729, when he was three years old.
He was educated at Edinburgh High School (like most Edinburgh children) where he was very interested in mathematics and chemistry, then when he was 14, he attended Edinburgh University as a "student of humanity", studying classics. He apprenticed to lawyer George Chalmers WS when he was 17, but more interested in chemical experiments than legal work. At the age of 18, he became a physician assistant, and attended medical school at Edinburgh University. After three years, he went to the University of Paris to continue his studies, taking Doctor of Medicine at Leiden University in 1749 with a thesis on blood circulation.
After the Hutton title returned to London, then in mid-1750 returned to Edinburgh and continued a chemical experiment with a close friend, James Davie. Their work on the production of ammoniac salts from soot causes their partnership in favorable chemical work, producing crystal salts used for dyeing, metalworking and as odorous salts and only available from natural sources and must be imported from Egypt. Hutton owns and rents property in Edinburgh, using factors to manage this business.
Agriculture and geology
Hutton inherited from his father Berwickshire farm of Slighhouses, a lowland farm that had been in the family since 1713, and a hill farm of the Nether Monynut. In the early 1750s he moved to Slighhouses and began to make improvements, introducing agricultural practices from other parts of the UK and experimenting with plants and farms. He recorded his ideas and innovations in an unpublished treatise on The Elements of Agriculture .
It develops its interest in meteorology and geology. In a 1753 letter he writes that he "loves to study the surface of the earth, and searches with curiosity to every hole or ditch or bed of a river that falls in its path". Cleaning and draining the fields provide many opportunities. Mathematician John Playfair describes Hutton for noticing that "most of these stones are composed of materials provided by the destruction of body, animals, vegetables and minerals, from more ancient formations". His theoretical ideas began to unite in 1760. While his agricultural activity continued, in 1764 he continued his geological tour of northern Scotland with George Maxwell-Clerk, the famous ancestor of James Clerk Maxwell.
Edinburgh and canal development
In 1768 Hutton returned to Edinburgh, allowing his ranch to become a tenant but was constantly drawn to agricultural improvements and research including experiments conducted at Slighhouses. He developed a red dye made from more angry plant roots.
He has a house built in 1770 at St. John's Hill, Edinburgh, overlooking Salisbury Crags. It later became the home of the Balfour family and, in 1840, the birthplace of psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne. Hutton was one of the most influential participants in the Scottish Enlightenment, and fell with many first-class thoughts in the sciences including mathematician John Playfair, philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith. Hutton holds no position at Edinburgh University and communicates his scientific findings through the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was very friendly with doctors and chemists Joseph Black, and along with Adam Smith they founded the Oyster Club for weekly meetings.
Between 1767 and 1774 Hutton had close involvement with the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canals, making full use of his geological knowledge, both as a shareholder and as a member of the management committee, and attending meetings including an extended location inspection of all works. He is currently listed as living on Bernard Street in Leith. In 1777 he published a pamphlet on Considerations of Nature, Quality and Coal and Culm Differences that successfully helped to get help from customs to bring small coal.
In 1783 he was co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Maps James Hutton
Next life and death
From 1791 Hutton suffered tremendous pain from a stone in the bladder and gave up field work to concentrate on finishing his books. Dangerous and painful surgery fails to solve the disease. He died in Edinburgh and was buried in the vault of Andrew Balfour, opposite the vault of his friend Joseph Black, in the now enclosed southwest Greyfriars Kirkyard commonly known as the Covenant Prison.
Hutton is not married and has no legitimate children. Around 1747 he had a son by Miss Edington, and although he gave his son the financial aid of James Smeaton Hutton, he had nothing to do with the boy who later became a post office employee in London.
The theory of rock formations
Hutton developed several hypotheses to explain the formation of the rocks he saw around him, but according to Playfair he "did not rush to publish his theory, for he was one of those who was much happier with the contemplation of truth, than with praise after finding it." After about 25 years of work, Theory of the Earth; or Legal Investigations that can be observed in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of the Land of the Globe was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh meeting in two parts, the first by his friend Joseph Black on March 7, 1785, and the second by himself on 4 April 1785. Hutton then read his dissertation on Earth Systems, its Duration and Stability to a Community meeting on July 4, 1785, which he had printed and distributed in person. In it, he describes his theory as follows;
The solid parts of this soil appear in general, consisting of marine production, and other materials similar to those now found on the coast. Therefore we found a reason to conclude:
First, That the ground where we rest is not simple and original, but it is a composition, and has been formed by a second cause operation.
Secondly, that before the land that is now created, there has been a world made up of seas and land, where there are ups and downs, with such operations on the seabed as it is now happening. And, Finally, that while the current land is formed at the bottom of the ocean, the former land keeps plants and animals alive; at least the sea is then inhabited by animals, in the same way as it is today Hence we conclude, that most of our land, if not all of it has been produced by the operation of nature into this world; but to make this land a permanent body, against aquatic operations, two things have been required; First, mass consolidation formed by a loose or incoherent collection of matter; Secondly, the height of the consolidated mass of seabed, the place where they were collected, to the station where they are now above sea level.
Find evidence
In 1785 at Glen Tilt in the Cairngorm mountains of the Scottish Highlands, Hutton found granite penetrating the metamorphic scis, in a way that indicated that granite had melted at the time. This shows him that granite is formed from the cooling of the molten rock rather than settling out of the water as others at the time believed, and therefore granite should be younger than the sekis.
He went on to find the same penetration of volcanic rock through sedimentary rocks in Edinburgh, in Salisbury Crags, adjacent to Arthur's Seat - the area of ​​Crags now known as Hutton's Section. He found another example in Galloway in 1786, and on the Isle of Arran in 1787.
The existence of angular dissonance has been noted by Nicolas Steno and by French geologists including Horace-BÃÆ' © nÃÆ' Â © nct de Saussure, who interpreted it in terms of Neptunism as "the main formation". Hutton wanted to check the formation itself to see the "special sign" of the relationship between layers of rock. In 1787 on the Isle of Arran he found his first example of Hutton's absence north of Newton Point near Lochranza, but limited view meant that underlying stratum conditions were not clear enough for him, and he mistakenly thought that the appropriate strata were at depth below the exposed outcrop.
Then in 1787 Hutton recorded what is now known as Hutton or "Great" Unconformity in Inchbonny, Jedburgh, in layers of sedimentary rock. As shown in the illustration on the right, the greywacke layers in the lower layers of the cliff face tilted almost vertically, and above the conglomerate intervening layer there is a horizontal layer of Old Red Sandstone. He then wrote about how he "rejoiced over my good fortune in discovering a very interesting object in the natural history of the earth, and which I had long been searching for in vain." That year, he found the same sequence at Teviotdale.
In the spring of 1788 he set out with John Playfair to Berwickshire beach and found more examples of this series in the valleys of Tour and Pease Burns near Cockburnspath. They then took a boat trip from Dunglass Burn east along the coast with the geologist Sir James Hall of Dunglass. They found a sequence on the cliff under St. Helens, then just east at Siccar Point to find what Hutton calls "the beautiful image of this intersection was washed naked by the sea". Playfair then commented on the experience, "the mind seems to grow dizzy by looking so far into the time gap". Continuing along the coast, they made more discoveries including parts of the vertical bed showing a strong ripple sign that gave Hutton "great satisfaction" as a confirmation of his assumption that this bed had been placed horizontally in the water. He also found a conglomerate at an altitude that showed the level of strata erosion, and said this that "we should never dream of meeting what we now feel".
Hutton reasoned that there must be innumerable cycles, each involving deposition on the seabed, lifting with tilting and erosion and then down again for further layers to be stored. In the belief that this is because of the same geological forces that operated in the past as a very slow geological force seen operating in the present, the thickness of the exposed rock layers implies to him a very long time.
Publications
Although Hutton personally circulated an abstract print version of his Theory ( Regarding Earth System, Duration, and Stability ) which he read at the Royal Society of Edinburgh meeting on July 4, 1785; the full report of his theory as read on March 7, 1785 and April 4, 1785 did not appear in print until 1788. It was entitled Theory of the Earth; or Legal Investigations that can be observed in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land on the Globe and appear in the Royal Society of Edinburgh Transactions , vol. I, Part II, pp. 209-304, plates I and II, published 1788. He posited the view that "from what actually exists, we have data to conclude with respect to what will happen thereafter." This reaffirms the Scottish Enlightenment concept which David Hume entered in 1777 as "all the conclusions of experience suppose... that the future will resemble the past," and Charles Lyell is remembered repeated in the 1830s as "now is the key to the times then. ". Hutton 1788 paper concluded; "The result, therefore, from our current investigation is that we did not find any initial remnants, -no final prospect." His closing remarks have long been celebrated. (It was quoted in the 1989 song "No Control" by songwriter and professor Greg Graffin.)
After criticism, especially the argument from Richard Kirwan who thought Hutton's idea was atheist and illogical, Hutton published two versions of his theory volume in 1795, consisting of a 1788 version of his theory (with a little extra) along with much of the material drawn from Hutton's short paper had to hand over various subjects such as granite origin. This includes alternative theoretical reviews, such as from Thomas Burnet and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.
The entitled entitled "Investigation of Knowledge Principles and Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy" when the third volume was completed in 1794. His 2,138 pages asked Playfair to comment that "The extraordinary book size, and fair ambiguity can be rejected by many parts of it, may have prevented it from being accepted as it is. "
The opposite theory
His new theories put him at odds with the popular Neptune theory of the past about Abraham Gottlob Werner, that all the rocks had settled from a great flood. Hutton proposes that the interior of the Earth is hot, and this heat is the engine that encourages the creation of new stones: the soil is eroded by air and water and stored as a layer in the sea; the heat then consolidates the sediment into the rock, and lifts it to new ground. This theory is dubbed "Plutonist" in contrast to the flood-oriented theory.
As well as fighting against Neptunis, it also opens the concept of deep time for scientific purposes, in opposition to Catastrophism. Instead of accepting that the earth is no more than a few thousand years old, he argues that the Earth must be much older, with a history extending indefinitely into the distant past. His main argument is that the magnificent displacements and changes he sees do not happen in a short time by means of disasters, but the processes still occurring on Earth today have caused them. Because this process is so gradual, the Earth must be ancient, to allow time for change. Soon, the scientific question triggered by his claim has pushed back the age of the earth into millions of years - is still too short compared to the age of 4.6 billion years received in the 21st century, but different improvements.
Acceptance of geological theory
It has been claimed that the prose of Principles of Knowledge is so vague that it also precludes acceptance of Hutton's geological theory. The reaffirmation of his geological idea (though not his idea of ​​evolution) by John Playfair in 1802 and then Charles Lyell in the 1830s popularized the concept of an infinite cycle of repetition, though Lyell tended to dismiss Hutton's view as too much confidence in the changes bring havoc.
Other contributions
Meteorology
It was not just the earth that Hutton directed his attention. He's been studying atmospheric changes for a long time. The same volume in which Theory of the Earth appears also contains Theory of Rain . He argues that the amount of water vapor that air can be stored in the solution increases with temperature, and therefore, that in a mixture of two air masses of different temperatures a portion of the moisture must be condensed and appear in visible form. He investigated available data on rainfall and climate in various regions of the world, and came to the conclusion that rainfall is governed by air humidity on one side, and mixing various air currents in higher atmospheres on the other..
Earth as a living entity
The idea that Earth lives is found in philosophy and religion, but the first scientific discussion is by James Hutton. In 1785, he declared that the Earth is a superorganism and the proper study must be physiology. Although his view anticipates the Gaia hypothesis, proposed in the 1960s by scientist James Lovelock, his idea of ​​a living Earth was forgotten in the intense reductionism of the nineteenth century.
Evolution
Hutton also advocated uniformitarianism for living things - evolution, in a sense - and even suggested natural selection as a mechanism that might affect them:
- "... if the organized body is not in the best circumstances adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in understanding the infinite variation among the individuals of that species, we must be sure that, on the one hand , those who most abandon the adjusted constitution will be the most likely to perish, while, on the other hand, the organized bodies, most closely approximating the best constitution to the present state, will be better adapted to continue in self-preservation them and multiply individuals of their race. "Ã, - Investigating Knowledge Principles , volume 2.
Hutton gives an example that where dogs survive through "the speed of the foot and the speed of vision... the most damaged in terms of required quality, will be the most perishing subject, and that those who use them in the greatest perfection... will be those who will remain , to take care of themselves, and to continue the race ". Similarly, if the acute sense of smell becomes "more important for animal food... the same principle [will] alter the quality of the animal, and... produce races with a well-scented body, than those who capture their prey at speed." The same "variation principle" will affect "any plant species, whether grown in the forest or grassland". He came to his ideas as a result of experiments in plant and animal breeding, some of which are described in unpublished manuscripts, Agricultural Elements . He distinguishes between variations inherited as a result of breeding, and inherited variations caused by environmental differences such as soil and climate.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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