To celebrate 300 years since the birth of Scottish geologist James Hutton on 3 June 1726, a manuscript of his groundbreaking book 'Theory of the Earth' (1795) will be on display in the Library at Burlington House.
Image credit: James Hutton in the field with his geological hammer by John Kay, 1787. © National Portrait Gallery, 16838.
James Hutton (1726–1797) was a Scottish geologist, agriculturalist, chemical manufacturer, naturalist and physician. Often referred to as the "Father of Modern Geology," the principles described in ‘Theory of the Earth’ (1795) were fundamental to the shaping of modern geological science.
The Library's document, on display for the whole of June, is the only known surviving geological manuscript by Hutton. Only the first two parts of 'Theory of the Earth' (1795) were published in his lifetime and this manuscript is a partial draft of either part 3 or 4. The Society would eventually publish it as the third volume in 1899.
It is written in a fair hand and was nearly ready to be sent to the printers for publication as Hutton has only annotated a few pages here and there with corrections or directions.
Hutton was known to have been working on the manuscript up until his death in 1797, after which the manuscript passed into the hands of his friend and first biographer John Playfair (1748-1819). Playfair subsequently gave the manuscript to his friend John Webb Seymour (1777-1819) who he accompanied on a field trip to Glen Tilt in 1807 as it contained Hutton’s descriptions of his visit there in 1785, which Seymour referenced throughout his own 1814 paper on the geology of the area.
Both Playfair and Seymour died in 1819 and the manuscript then passed to Seymour’s brother the Duke of Somerset, who in turn gave it to Leonard Horner (1785-1864).
Horner, who was the father-in-law of Charles Lyell and a keen Huttonian, finally gave the manuscript to the Geological Society in 1856 “to be preserved in the Library, as an interesting document in the History of Science”.
The manuscript will be displayed in the Society's Library in Burlington House, London throughout June.
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Excerpt from Hutton's manuscript. The page on the right is written neatly by an unknown scribe, and describes his observations on the geology around Glen Tilt, Scotland. On the left are Hutton's handwritten notes to indicate where an illustration should be included in the published version.