Theory of the Earth

Hutton, J. (1788). "Theory of the Earth or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and restoration of land upon the globe." R. Soc. Edin. Trans. 1,209-304. 

French naturalist famous for his beautiful literary style. Founder of the Jardin des Plantes. Author of a Natural History in forty-four volumes, in which he discussed insects, birds, quadrupeds, minerals, the theory of the earth, and the epochs of Nature. One of the first to investigate platinum. 

Anderson D.L. (1989) Theory of the Earth. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Boston, 366 pp. 

Hutton s theory of heat was very important to his theory of the Earth but was given little prominence in the accounts of Hutton s theory developed by his followers, notably John Playfair and Sir James Hall,24 who reinterpreted and reshaped it. For them the chemical theory of heat was an excisable irrelevance, a diversion from the centrally important features of Hutton s theory of the Earth.25... 

Hutton used the ideas of latent and specific heats, which were respectively the principles of fluidity and volume, as parts of the repulsive force or what he called the solar substance . Together with light and electricity, specific heat and volume made up the repulsive force. Hutton explained the dynamics of natural cycles of rock formations largely in these terms within his theory, and so Hutton s theory of the Earth was given its dynamics by the chemical theory of heat. 

A number of historians of geology have been persuaded that Hutton s exposure to Watt s steam engines probably provided Hutton wi th the idea of the Earth as a machine, which is a recurrent analogy in his theory of the Earth. Playfair s... 

Gerstner, James Hutton s Theory of the Earth Donovan, James Hutton pp. 176-7. 

See especially, Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth and Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth, pp. 86-107. 

Gerstner, P. A. James I lutton s Theory of the Earth and his Theory of Matter Isis, 59 (1968),... 

Hutton, J., Theory of the Earth or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe) Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 1, Pt II (1788), pp. 209-304. 

Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols (Edinburgh William Creech, 1795). 

Poirier, Lavoisier, 17-21 R. Rappaport, Lavoisier s Theory of the Earth, British Journal for the History of Science 6,1973, 247-260, at 252. 

Michael Neve in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives the date of Beddoes s appointment as Reader as Spring 1788 but Beddoes styled himself Reader in his memorial on the state of the Bodleain Library, printed and issued in 1787. His lectures were not only on chemistry, but also on the closely related discipline of mineralogy, and on the theory of the earth, which in the late eighteenth century was enlivened by the conflict between the theories of Werner and Hutton. 

J. Kidd, A Geological Essay on the imperfect evidence in support of a theory of the Earth—, Oxford, 1815. 

Carey, S.W., Theories of the Earth and Universe, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1988. 

Theory of the Earth, 1795 Wightman, The Growth of Scientific Ideas, Edinburgh, 1950, 398. 

Pick, M., Plcha, J., and Vysko il, V. (1973). Theory of the Earth s Gravity Field, Elsevier, Amsterdam/New York. 

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