James Hutton
James Hutton - A Famous Scottish Scientist
James Hutton (1916 - ) James Hutton was educated at Edinburgh, Paris, and Leyden, where he qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1749. He then travelled over the Low Countries studying agriculture, and later joined up with James Davie in a project to recover sal-ammoniac from soot. He settled in Edinburgh in 1768, and devoted himself to geology. In Theory of the Earth, published in 1785 (extended and republished in 1795) he asserted that the key to the geological past is to be found in the processes at present going on, a tenet known as 'Hutton's principle'. His observations of the lavas and other rocks associated with active volcanoes led him to distinguish between igneous or fire-formed rocks and sedimentary or water-formed rocks, thus opposing the views of A.G. Werner, who had maintained in 1775 that all rocks are water formed. Hutton's followers became known as 'Plutonists' or 'Vulcanists', in contradistinction to werner's 'Neptunists', and his teaching led to the establishment of the modern theory of the Earth's crustal rocks. His last published work, Investigations of the Principles of Knowledge, appeared in 1794, his death preventing the completion of The Elements of Agriculture.
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