Hutton owes no debt to Browne
Sir, Historical myths are hardy perennials, and myths about Hutton continue to be propagated in the media, in blissful or perhaps wilful (chauvinistic?) ignorance of a body of historical research that sets his ideas in their contemporary context. Briefly, the very words of Hutton's famous "vestige... prospect..." quote show what he himself was open about: that he was an *eternalist* - a position antithetical to modern geology's developmental model of the history of the Earth (and of the cosmos).
The Browne "but five days" quote shows equally clearly that *his* cosmology was, within the limited time frame of his generation, a developmental one from start to finish ("alpha" to "omega"). By Hutton's time, geologists had adopted Browne's kind of model, having simply expanded it into a far longer - but still *finite* - time dimension. Hutton's contemporaries criticised him for his eternalism, not his lengthy time. Modern geology therefore stems far more from them than from him.
This conclusion is now obvious to historians of geology, backed by a large body of historical research. Among many books that summarise this work, I dare to cite my own ‘Earth's Deep History’ (Chicago 2014) because it gives a brief bird's-eye-view all the way from Browne (and Ussher's 4004BC) to the present, and includes a "further reading" section that gives references to a lot of other historians' work. A fuller evaluation of Hutton is in my ‘Bursting the Limits of Time’ (Chicago 2005), pp. 158-172, with detailed footnoted references to primary and secondary sources to back it up.
Martin Rudwick