Chapter Five

The Earth is no older than Mankind

5.1 “In the late eighteenth century scientists had begun to suggest that the earth must be older than the bible, but they couldn’t agree on how the earth had formed. The so-called ‘Neptunists’ believed that water had been the main force, creating rocks by sedimentation, slowly building up mountains, minerals and geological formations out of a primordial ocean. Others, the ‘Vulcanists’ argued that everything had originated through catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions”. Just as lakes and mountains had provided the inspiration to Dr Servettaz, so they had provided the inspiration for one of the great scientific debates of the eighteenth century. A young graduate of Edinburgh University set out to resolve this dispute. But to do this he needed to create a field of scientific inquiry new to the western world. It is now called Geology.

5.2 James Hutton was born in Edinburgh on 3 June 1726. When he was 14 he attended the University of Edinburgh as a "student of humanity" i.e. Latin and Greek. At the age of 18, he became a physician's assistant, and attended lectures in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After three years he went to the University of Paris to continue his studies, taking the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Leiden University in 1749 with a thesis on blood circulation. As we have seen with Dr Servettaz and will see on more than one occasion in this history of the environmental movement, doctors seem to play an especially prominent role, often in creating new fields of inquiry far from their original training. Is this perhaps explained by their extending their study of the human body as one living organism whose health depends upon countless, highly complex interacting networks and processes, to the natural world around them?

5.3 Hutton inherited from his father the Berwickshire farm of Slighhouses. He moved there in the 1750s and set about making improvements, introducing farming practices from other parts of Britain and experimenting with plant and animal husbandry. He recorded his ideas and innovations in an unpublished treatise on The Elements of Agriculture. This developed his interest in meteorology and geology. In a 1753 letter he wrote that he had "become very fond of studying the surface of the earth, and was looking with anxious curiosity into every pit or ditch or bed of a river that fell in his way". Clearing and draining his farm provided ample opportunities. Playfair describes Hutton as having noticed that "a vast proportion of the present rocks are composed of materials afforded by the destruction of bodies, animal, vegetable and mineral, of more ancient formation". His theoretical ideas began to come together in 1760. While his farming activities continued, in 1764 he went on a geological tour of the north of Scotland with George Maxwell-Clerk, ancestor of the famous James Clerk Maxwell.

5.4 In 1768 Hutton returned to Edinburgh and became one of the most influential participants in the Scottish Enlightenment, along with numerous first-class minds in the sciences including John Playfair, philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith.

5.5 Hutton hit on a variety of ideas to explain the rock formations he saw around him, but according to Playfair he "was in no haste to publish his theory; for he was one of those who are much more delighted with the contemplation of truth, than with the praise of having discovered it". After some 25 years of work, his “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe” was read to meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in two parts in March and April 1785. Hutton subsequently read an abstract of his dissertation Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration and Stability to Society meeting on 4 July 1785, which he had printed and circulated privately. In it, he outlined his theory as follows;
‘The solid parts of the present land appear in general, to have been composed of the productions of the sea, and of other materials similar to those now found upon the shores. Hence we find reason to conclude:
1st, That the land on which we rest is not simple and original, but that it is a composition, and had been formed by the operation of second causes.
2nd, That before the present land was made, there had subsisted a world composed of sea and land, in which were tides and currents, with such operations at the bottom of the sea as now take place. And,
Lastly, That while the present land was forming at the bottom of the ocean, the former land maintained plants and animals; at least the sea was then inhabited by animals, in a similar manner as it is at present.
Hence we are led to conclude, that the greater part of our land, if not the whole had been produced by operations natural to this globe; but that in order to make this land a permanent body, resisting the operations of the waters, two things had been required;
1st, The consolidation of masses formed by collections of loose or incoherent materials;
2ndly The elevation of those consolidated masses from the bottom of the sea,

5.6 Hutton reasoned that there must have been innumerable cycles, each involving deposition on the seabed, uplift with tilting and erosion then undersea again for further layers to be deposited. On the belief that this was due to the same geological forces operating in the past as the very slow geological forces seen operating at the present day, the thicknesses of exposed rock layers implied to him enormous stretches of time. Hutton put forward the view that "from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter." This restated the Scottish Enlightenment concept which David Hume had put in 1777 as "all inferences from experience suppose ... that the future will resemble the past", and which Charles Lyell memorably rephrased in the 1830s as "the present is the key to the past".

5.7 His new theories placed him into opposition with the then-popular Neptunist theories of Abraham Gottlob Werner, that all rocks had precipitated out of a single enormous flood. Hutton proposed that the interior of the Earth was hot, and that this heat was the engine which drove the creation of new rock: land was eroded by air and water and deposited as layers in the sea; heat then consolidated the sediment into stone, and uplifted it into new lands. This theory was dubbed "Plutonist" or “Vulcanists” in contrast to the flood-oriented theory.

5.8 As well as combating the Neptunists, he also opened up the concept of deep time for scientific purposes. Rather than accepting that the earth was no more than a few thousand years old, he maintained that the Earth must be much older, with a history extending indefinitely into the distant past. His main line of argument was that the tremendous displacements and changes he was seeing did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that processes still happening on the Earth in the present day had caused them. As these processes were very gradual, the Earth needed to be ancient, to allow time for the changes.

5.9 But James Hutton’s publications were long and abstruse and failed to capture the public imagination. His ideas became widespread thanks to Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet (1797 – 1875) who was the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularized James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism —the idea that the Earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. Principles of Geology also challenged theories popularized by Georges Cuvier, which were the most accepted and circulated ideas about geology in England at the time.

5.10 His scientific contributions included an explanation of earthquakes, the theory of gradual "backed up-building" of volcanoes, and in stratigraphy the division of the Tertiary period into the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene. He also coined the currently-used names for geological eras, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic.

5.11 Lyell was one of the first to believe that the world is older than 300 million years, on the basis of its geological anomalies. He was a close friend of Charles Darwin, and contributed significantly to Darwin's thinking on the processes involved in evolution. He helped to arrange the simultaneous publication in 1858 of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection, despite his personal religious qualms about the theory. He later published evidence from geology of the time man had existed on Earth.

5.12 The debate between the opposite explanations of the rock formations seen throughout the world - catastrophism championed by Cuvier and uniformitarianism championed by Hutton and Lyell – raged for a hundred years. And once again it was mountains which held the secret to understanding the history of the world. The debate was resolved by a complete outsider to the world of geophysisists, and the answer: it was neither. Instead it was a process of continental drift that explained the formation of mountains. Ridiculed at first Wenger was eventually proved correct in what was one of the most profound insights there has been into the history of the natural world. And it was the Alps – the most studied mountain range in the world – that began to provide proof for Wenger’s hypothesis.

5.13 Émile Argand (1916) speculated that the Alps were caused by the North motion of the African shield, and finally accepted this reason 1922, following Wegener's Continental drift theory.

5.14 Otto Ampferer in the mean time, at the Geological Society Meeting in Vienna, held on 4 April 1919, defended the link between the alpine faulting and Wegener's continental drift. "The Alpine orogeny is the effect of the migration of the North African shield. Smoothing only alpine folds and nappes on the cross section between the Black Forest and Africa once again, then from the present distance of about 1,800 km, we have an initial gap of around 3,000 to 3,500 km, i.e. a pressing of the alpine region, alpine region in a broader sense, of 1,500 km. To this amount must be Africa have moved to Europe. This brings us then to a true large scale continental drift of the African shield".

5.15 Hutton would have thrilled to see the theory of Plate Tectonics - the final vindication of his theories of the slow process of rock formation over millions of years. Moreover, this idea of a world constantly shifting and changing at he scale of land masses and continents, resonates with one last idea of Hutton’s. The idea that the Earth is alive is found in philosophy and religion, but the first scientific discussion was by James Hutton. In 1785, he stated that the Earth was a superorganism and that its proper study should be physiology.

5.16 Although his views anticipated the Gaia hypothesis, proposed in the 1960s by scientist James Lovelock, his idea of a living Earth was largely forgotten during the 19th century. Nevertheless it time it would mark another seismic shift in Man’s relationship to Nature and another example of one person's seeing what those around him couldn't see.

Continue Reading  Chapter Six