James hutton biography wikipedia

Hutton advanced the idea that the physical world's remote history can be inferred from evidence in present-day rocks. Through his study of features in the landscape and coastlines of his native Scottish lowlands , such as Salisbury Crags or Siccar Point , he developed the theory that geological features could not be static but underwent continuing transformation over indefinitely long periods of time.

From this he argued, in agreement with many other early geologists, that the Earth could not be young. He was one of the earliest proponents of what in the s became known as uniformitarianism , the science which explains features of the Earth's crust as the outcome of continuing natural processes over the long geologic time scale.

James hutton uniformitarianism

Hutton also put forward a thesis for a 'system of the habitable Earth' proposed as a deistic mechanism designed to keep the world eternally suitable for humans, [ 5 ] an early attempt to formulate what today might be called one kind of anthropic principle. Some reflections similar to those of Hutton can be found in publications of his contemporaries, such as the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon , [ 5 ] but it is chiefly Hutton's pioneering work that established the field.

Hutton was born in Edinburgh on 3 June O. Hutton's father died in , when he was three. He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh where he was particularly interested in mathematics and chemistry , then when he was 14 he attended the University of Edinburgh as a "student of humanity", studying the classics. He was apprenticed to the lawyer George Chalmers WS when he was 17, but took more interest in chemical experiments than legal work.

At the age of 18, he became a physician's assistant, and attended lectures in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After a two-year stay in Paris, James Hutton arrived in Leiden in , where he enrolled at the University of Leiden on 14 August , at the home of the then rector magnificus Joachim Schwartz to obtain a doctorate in medicine.

His supervisor was Professor Frederik Winter, who was not only a professor at Leiden University, but also court physician to the Stadholder. The Latin manuscript of Hutton's dissertation also contained 92 theses, two of which were successfully defended in public by James Hutton on 3 September On 12 September , James Hutton obtained his doctorate in medicine from Leiden University with a physico-medical thesis entitled Sanguine et Circulatione Microcosmi.