AT JUST THE time that Henry Cavendish was completing his experiments in London, fourhundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of concluding moment was about to take placewith the death of James Hutton. This was bad news for Hutton, of course, but good news forscience as it cleared the way for a man named John Playfair to rewrite Hutton’s work withoutfear of embarrassment.

Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation, a delightin company, and without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processesthat shaped the Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form thatanyone could begin to understand. He was, as one biographer observed with an all but audiblesigh, “almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments.” Nearly every line he pennedwas an invitation to slumber. Here he is in his 1795 masterwork, A Theory of the Earth withProofs and Illustrations , discussing . . . something:

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