Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution, and restoration of land upon the globe… Read March 7 and April 4 1785. Offprint from: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. I.
[Edinburgh: J. Dickson for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, c.1787]. First edition, extremely rare offprint from the family of the great Scottish mathematician James Stirling (1692–1770), of the epoch-making Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe, read at two meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 7 March and 4 April 1785 and published in Part II of Volume I of the Transactions (Edinburgh: J. Dickson, 1788), pp. 209–304, with two engraved plates. In this paper Hutton lays the foundations of uniformitarianism, the doctrine that the earth’s surface is the continuous product of natural forces still operating today — the idea whose acceptance, through Lyell and Darwin, would transform the natural sciences of the nineteenth century. This copy of the offprint is bound after John Whitehurst’s An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London: for the author, 1778). RBH lists only the Norman–Freilich copy (Christie’s New York, 15 June 1998, lot 540, $36,800; resold Sotheby’s New York, 10 January 2001, lot 259, $28,350). A further copy, in a sammelband from James Watt’s library, was sold by Sotheby’s in 2003. Library Hub locates copies at the British Library, the Bodleian, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the National Library of Scotland. Hutton’s fundamental conception, now accepted as a matter of course but then entirely new, was that the formation of the surface of the earth is one continuous process which can be studied entirely from terrestrial materials, without cosmological or supernatural intervention. His discussion of the erosion of land surfaces by the atmospheric, chemical, and mechanical action of water, together with his central principle that small changes acting over immense periods of time produce gigantic transformations, had far-reaching consequences in their influence on Charles Lyell and, through Lyell, on Darwin. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography calls his cyclical view of geological processes “a principle now accepted as axiomatic.” The revolutionary nature of Hutton’s system lay equally in its rejection of the catastrophic view of geological evolution, in its cyclical view of earth history, and in its insistence that the materials of the earth itself — not revelation, not cosmogony — constitute the adequate testimony to a continuous and uniform process of change. His methodology was of nearly equal importance to the development of geology: the examination of rocks in their structural relations, attention to their mineralogical and chemical composition, and close study of the physical processes now operating on the earth’s surface as the key to the past and an indication of the future course of events. Hutton was the first field geologist in the modern sense. James Hutton (1726–1797) was born in Edinburgh on 3 June 1726. At fourteen he entered Edinburgh University to study humanities and medicine; he studied chemistry and anatomy in Paris, and took his medical degree at Leyden in 1749 with a thesis on the circulation of the blood. In 1750 he inherited and worked two farms in the Scottish Borders, travelling to Norfolk and Flanders to learn new methods of husbandry and applying them on his own land. It was on his farms, through direct observation of erosion and sediment deposition, that his geological interests took shape. After a decade of successful farming he returned to Edinburgh in 1767, where with Joseph Black he established a successful sal ammoniac manufactory that provided him a steady income and the leisure to pursue his geological work. In 1777 he published a small pamphlet, Considerations on the Nature, Quality, and Distinctions of Coal and Culm, a commercial rather than geological piece arguing that the low-grade stony coal exported from Edinburgh for lime-burning should qualify for a lower rate of duty — a document that, together with his involvement in the Forth and Clyde Canal, indicates the practical recognition his geological knowledge had already attained. In Edinburgh, Hutton entered the remarkable intellectual circle that made the city, in Tobias Smollett’s phrase, “a hotbed of genius.” He enjoyed the company of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, James Watt, Adam Smith, Joseph Black, and the mathematician John Playfair; his special companion on geological travels was John Clerk of Eldin. Through the elder Watt, Hutton was introduced during a tour of England to members of what would later be called the Lunar Society, and thereafter he corresponded with Erasmus Darwin and Matthew Boulton. When the Royal Society of Edinburgh was founded in 1783, Hutton became one of its most active supporters. Between 1785 and 1788 he visited various parts of Scotland assembling the field evidence that the 1795 expansion of the Theory would incorporate. After 1788, so far as is known, he made no more field excursions; from 1791 he was subject to recurrent illness and devoted his remaining years to lesser-known works on chemistry, physics, and philosophy. He died on 26 March 1797 and is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh. Hutton’s theory — which he invariably called a “system,” the title “Theory of the Earth” having been applied to the work by the editors of the Edinburgh Transactions — postulated a cyclical history of the earth in four stages: erosion of existing land, deposition of the eroded material as strata at the bottom of the ocean, compression and consolidation of those strata under the heat that lies beneath the earth’s crust, and the fracturing and re-emersion of the fused sediments to form new continents. The opening Part, Prospect of the Subject to be Treated of, presents the earth as a unique creation — in Hutton’s deistic framing, specifically designed by an infinitely wise Creator to serve as a habitable world for life in all its forms. The world consists of four spherical parts — core, water, crust, and air — each of which contributes to the maintenance of life. A solid body of land could not have answered the purpose of a habitable world, because soil is necessary to the growth of plants, and soil is nothing more than materials collected from the destruction of land. The continents are therefore necessarily subject to erosion by water and air — a process that, paradoxically, is part of a great cycle by which the continuing fertility of the earth is assured. That this process is extremely slow, involving lengths of time beyond human experience and comprehension, should not disguise the benevolence underlying it. Fossil shells and other such relics prove that the earth has a history far antedating all human records. Part II, An Investigation of the Natural Operations Employed in Consolidating the Strata of the Globe, addresses the mechanism by which originally loose sediment becomes firm rock. Logic suggests only two possible means: aqueous solution and crystallisation, or heat and fusion. Water can dissolve only some of the materials involved, and can deposit them only in simple ways; heat and fusion encounter no such restriction. Hutton presses the argument with a parade of examples from his own collection — indissoluble silicates such as feldspar, flint, and fossil wood; sulphurous minerals, metals, and coal; rock salt, ironstone septaria, and agates. Calton Hill, Edinburgh, a basaltic outcrop filled with nodules, is a geological exhibit of fusion brought within the city. Sandstone and limestone strata, which together constitute nearly all of the globe, show that consolidation without the introduction of foreign matter — merely by the softening or fusion of their own materials — is universal. A specimen of granite from Portsoy, depicted in Plate II, proves that granite has crystallised out of a fluid state by means of fusion. Perpendicular fissures and veins and fragments of former strata complete the picture. Part III, Investigation of the Natural Operations Employed in the Production of Land above the Surface of the Sea, addresses the problem of how strata deposited horizontally at the sea floor come to stand at every possible angle on dry land. How else but by the same subterranean heat already established to consolidate them? Earthquakes and volcanoes, themselves products of subterranean heat, demonstrate that the force is sufficient and universal. The remains of ancient volcanoes have been found in many countries; lava occurs where no vestige of volcano remains. Hutton draws the distinction, decisive for subsequent geology, between basalt and lava: virtually identical in origin and composition, the two rocks are differentiated only by the conditions of their production. Lava was erupted into the atmosphere while still fluid; basalt congealed within the earth under immense compression — “subterranean lava,” in his phrase. Only basalt contains solid inclusions. The flowing of basaltic streams among strata “broke and displaced,” he writes (p. 282), affords the most satisfactory evidence of the operations by which the body of our land had been elevated above the surface of the sea. Though his examples are mostly Scottish and Derbyshire, the argument is global: the great masses of the earth are the same everywhere, and all the different species of earths and rocks that have yet appeared are to be found in the little space of this island. To know the construction of Britain is to know the construction of the world. Part IV, System of Decay and Renovation Observed in the Earth, synthesises the preceding parts into a single steady-state system. Philosophers have imagined an earth more regular than ours, one subsequently soiled by some natural disaster or exercise of divine wrath; yet the present earth, in all its beauty and diversity, is ideally suited for habitation, its processes stable, unchanging, and purposeful. Among known fossils are remains of every plant or animal genus (and probably species) now living on the earth, and some with which we are otherwise unacquainted — together with gravel, sand, and clay derived in a former world by processes observable in ours, these relics affirm that the former world was in all respects essentially a duplicate of our own. The continent destined to succeed ours has probably begun already to appear — Captain Cook’s 1778 discovery of the Hawaiian Islands is the datum from which Hutton infers a three-part cycle rather than two. “The system is still the same,” but given successive replacements, we cannot hope to discover either the first cycle or the last. It is here that Hutton concludes with the remarkable and often-misunderstood affirmation that the present enquiry finds no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end (p. 304). The sentence is not a denial that the earth had a beginning or will have an end, but a statement that the geological record reveals no trace of either — that earth’s history, as far as observation can reach, is cyclical and without boundary. The date of the offprint’s appearance has long been a matter of debate, settled by Dennis Dean in his 1992 monograph, James Hutton and the History of Geology (pp. 47–49). On 25 August 1787 Josiah Wedgwood wrote to James Watt that Josiah Wedgwood, Junior, would soon send two copies of the Theory of the Earth to Watt’s address — one for Watt himself and the other for Matthew Boulton — the books having been brought from Scotland with Wedgwood the younger by Dr Hutton himself. Two days later, on 27 August 1787, Joseph Black, the discoverer of latent heat and no one better qualified to know, wrote to the Princess Dashkov, Director of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg, of Dr Hutton and his new theory. Black added that Hutton had formed the system, or its principal parts, more than twenty years before, and noted that the offprint so far in circulation was only a specimen of a larger work then in preparation. These two letters, written within forty-eight hours of each other, fix the appearance of the offprint to August 1787. V. A. Eyles had earlier located only three copies of the ninety-six-page separate but could not establish its date; Dean’s discovery resolves the matter. An apparent copy dated 1786 (Edinburgh: Printed for William Creech, 1786) held at the University of St Andrews (TypBE.D86CH) has a watermark of 1807, from which the library conclude that it is a pirated edition published some twenty years after the original offprint. Hutton’s full paper was preceded by his Abstract of a Dissertation Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability, published under his name in 1785, of which a few copies survive — one of the great rarities in the history of science, with perhaps ten to twelve extant copies. The stylistic analysis in Dean’s monograph (pp. 275–276) demonstrates that the published version of the Abstract, though based on a draft by Hutton, was in fact written by his friend the churchman and historian William Robertson (1721–1793); the earlier suggestion that it was written by Playfair is categorically rejected by Dean. The present 1787 offprint is therefore the first published account of Hutton’s theory in his own words, and the first detailed account in any form. Hutton was aware of his own limitations as a writer: though a strict logician, he was almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishment and did not, in Dean’s description, know how to construct expository paragraphs. Robertson, by contrast, had been celebrated since his History of Scotland 1542–1603 of 1759 as among the finest of Scottish prose stylists. The theory was met with widespread criticism; it was largely to defend himself against charges of atheism, and more particularly to answer the detailed criticism published by the Irish chemist and mineralogist Richard Kirwan, that Hutton published in 1795 the expanded two-volume version of his work, Theory of the Earth; with Proofs and Illustrations, which consists largely of the supporting proofs omitted from his succinct initial presentation. A third volume, containing much information about Hutton’s geological travels and observations, remained in manuscript and was only published in 1899 by Sir Archibald Geikie. Hutton’s theory did not begin to gain general acceptance until after the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (London, 1830–33), and it was another thirty years before his theories of the role of erosion were proven correct. John Playfair, who in 1785 had not been privy to the details of Hutton’s theory before its presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh — and who on hearing that theory had remained sceptical because he could not see how it explained the oblate shape of the earth — became within a few years Hutton’s leading expositor. On 4 June 1788, only months after the full paper appeared in the Transactions, Playfair accompanied Hutton to Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast, where in the angular unconformity between the vertical Silurian greywackes and the near-horizontal Devonian Old Red Sandstone above them the two men read the record of one complete cycle of Hutton’s system — the moment, by Playfair’s later account, when the observing mind grew giddy at the prospect of so vast an abyss of time. Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of 1802, written after his friend’s death, is the document by which Hutton’s system first reached a wide audience in a form readers could comprehend. John Whitehurst (1713–1788), whose Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth precedes Hutton’s offprint in this volume, was the oldest member of the Lunar Society. Born in Congleton in Cheshire, he moved to Derby and made a name for himself as a clockmaker and engineer in the Midlands and London. He shared an interest in geology with the other Lunar Society figures — Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and William Withering — and was a close friend of the painter Joseph Wright of Derby. The mid-eighteenth-century excavation of mines, the building of canals, and the exploration of caves were providing evidence of rock formation and fossils that encouraged speculation on the origin of the earth, and the Derbyshire countryside, mineralogically rich, was fertile ground for observation. Whitehurst’s book is in two parts. The first, occupying most of the volume, attempts to connect Christian beliefs in divine creation and the Flood with geological evidence for the formation of the earth, and explores the role of volcanic action and subterranean fire in shaping its features. The second part, the Appendix, “General Observations on the Strata in Derbyshire,” is the significant one: it provides an insight into stratigraphy, accompanied by beautifully engraved sectional diagrams, and establishes a succession for the Carboniferous rocks of Derbyshire — from stone, clay, and coal at the top down through millstone grit and shale to limestone and toadstones at the base. Whitehurst recognised the toadstones as creations of volcanic action, and he explained that coal was originally derived from vegetable matter. Theoretically the subject was controversial, as it progressively undermined the biblical accounts of the origins of the earth, and Whitehurst was not prepared to follow the argument into open conflict with scripture. But the quality and depth of his recorded observations made his contribution a significant one in the eighteenth-century science. The pairing of Whitehurst with Hutton in this volume reflects a contemporary reader’s understanding of the two books as complementary treatments of the same problem — one cautious and stratigraphic, the other bold and systemic. Provenance: Garden House, the seat of the Stirling family. The presence of an important geological work in the Garden library is almost certainly explained by the Stirling family’s long involvement in Scottish mining. Its most famous member, the mathematician James Stirling (1692–1770) — a close associate and correspondent of Newton, and the author of the Methodus Differentialis of 1730 — had a notable impact on Scottish mining after his appointment in 1735 as manager of the mines at Leadhills, Lanarkshire, on behalf of the Scots Mining Company. Stirling’s daughter Christian married her cousin, Archibald Stirling of Garden; on James Stirling’s death in 1770 Archibald succeeded him as manager of the Leadhills mines, and the estate of Garden has remained in the family’s possession ever since. The volume is therefore a direct survival from the library of one of the great Scottish families of natural philosophy, geology, and mining — a provenance congruent with the book’s intellectual character. References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 93 — ESTC T53062 — Horblit 52a (first book appearance of 1795) — Linda Hall Library, Theories of the Earth 38 — Norman 1130 (offprint) — Printing and the Mind of Man 247 — Sparrow, Milestones of Science 107 and p. 24 — Challinor 40 — Ward & Carozzi 1161 — Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences, 238–245 — Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology (1992) — Geikie, The Founders of Geology, 280–316 — Zittel, History of Geology and Palaeontology, 68–73 (Hutton characterised there as the founder of physical and dynamical geology and the first to establish the correlation of denudation and deposition) — Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1802). Two works bound in one vol., 4to (256 × 198 mm). [Whitehurst:] pp. [viii], 199, with 4 engraved plates (2 folding), and one additional folding plate apparently not called for (a section of the Lead Mines in Wear-Dale, frayed). [Hutton:] pp. [ii], 96, [2, Explanation of Plate], with 2 engraved plates, caption-title to p. 1. Contemporary marbled calf, red morocco spine-label lettered Theorys of the Earth, marbled edges. A fine copy.
Item #6605
Price: $95,000.00
