The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity

  • Jack Repcheck
Perseus: 2003. 229 pp. US$26, Can$40 Simon & Schuster: 2003. £15.99
Rock solid: drawings of Siccar Point support James Hutton's ideas about the vastness of geological time. Credit: J. D. CLERK/SCRAN

The Man Who Found Time is an example of a genre of science history that frequently appears in airport bookshops. The author takes an important figure or theme in the history of science — often one little known to the general public — and writes about it in a pleasant and engaging way, telling a story that deserves to be widely known. Such books seemingly make good money for publishers and authors, and are likely to be reviewed widely in journals such as Nature. So it is surprising how few professional historians of science have grasped such attractive opportunities.

These 'airport lounge' books seem to be creatures of publishers as much as authors. But why do publishers choose amateur science historians as writers? Who has the idea for these books: the authors or the publishers? Who does the real work in getting these books out? These thoughts are prompted by Jack Repcheck's enormous list of acknowledgements, among whom the agent, the publisher's staff and the editor are given special thanks. Repcheck also thanks various Hutton scholars for doing “research and spadework” without which the book “would have been impossible”.

With all that back-up, one might expect a superior product. However, I was initially provided with a pre-publication version of the book. This gave me an insight into the author's uncertain grasp of the facts. The early copy was littered with so many errors that I asked to be supplied with the final version of the book before attempting a review. When it arrived, I was pleased to see that many of the obvious glitches had been dealt with (for example, Derby was now a town and not a river). But the principle of universal gravitation was still described as “the first natural law to be identified” (what about the laws of reflection and refraction?). Some erroneous definitions of geological terms had been corrected, but incongruities remained, such as the idea of “vacillation” between marine and terrestrial environments.

Having said this, the theme is worthwhile and the text is pleasantly written. After an (unnecessarily lengthy) account of how the idea of a young Earth was established, based on biblical and other historical records, Repcheck sketches some of the main events of Scottish eighteenth-century political history, Hutton's Edinburgh environment, his intellectual milieu, and his personality, career, ideas and achievements. He then gives an incomplete account of Hutton's scientific work, and carries the story through to the work of Charles Lyell and Darwin.

Naturally, I accept that Hutton was a pivotal figure in the history of geoscience and deserves to be much more widely known. He considered weathering and erosion, and developed a cyclic theory of Earth's history. Sediments were thought to be consolidated by the Earth's hypothesized internal heat. From time to time, magma was supposedly intruded into the Earth's crust, elevating land and forming new rock that in time would weather and erode to form new soils and eventually sediments. So while constantly changing, the Earth is a grand system in which the formation and destruction of rocks is balanced and conditions suitable for human existence maintained.

Hutton predicted the occurrence of unconformities, and confirmed his predictions in the field. When he examined a remarkable unconformity on the Berwickshire coast (at Siccar Point) with friends, they felt they were looking into the “abyss of time”. The immensity of time that Hutton's grand cycles of geological change required could be seen from the arrangement of the rocks. Without such work, Lyell and Darwin would not have been able to do what they did.

Repcheck outlines this argument satisfactorily, but there are serious gaps in his account. No mention is made of Hutton's work on philosophy or his unpublished treatise on agriculture (which adumbrated the idea of natural selection). Repcheck insists on the significance of Hutton's chemical ideas, but says nothing about his ideas on phlogiston and 'solar substance', which were important in his overall theory (to the extent that some Gaia aficionados regard him as one of their forebears). Little is said about Hutton's methodology, and there is nothing about his claimed intellectual debt to the earlier work of Robert Hooke (described in Ellen Drake's 1996 book Restless Genius), other than saying that Hooke's work offered one of the important precursory publications for Hutton.

More seriously, there is no mention of how Lyell's observations of the still-standing columns of an ancient building at Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples influenced Lyell's ideas about elevation and subsidence. Even more importantly, given the book's theme, nothing is said of Lyell's interpretation of the accumulation of Mount Etna's lava flows, which overlie geologically quite recent rocks, as evidence for the Earth's great age. But I should be surprised if the author knew about such matters, his knowledge of the history of geology literature evidently being limited.

All in all, the book reveals the author as an amateur historian of science, leaning on the work of others and not doing justice to his important theme. Yet the book will doubtless sell well with the publishers' backing. In contrast, another semi-popular, but authoritative, book by the Hutton scholar Donald McIntyre (with Alan McKirdy), James Hutton: The Founder of Modern Geology (The Stationery Office, 1997), received insufficient funding to accommodate references and had only a very brief bibliography and a modest print run. Why should this be so?