Hutton, JAMES, one of the founders of geology, was born at Edinburgh, 3d June 1726. He studied medicine in his native city and at Paris and Leyden, but on his return home (1754) he settled in Berwickshire and devoted himself to agricultural pursuits and to chemistry, from which he was led to mineralogy and geology. In 1768 he removed to Edinburgh, and there spent his time in scientific investigations, and there he died, 26th March 1797. He read two important papers before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, A Theory of the Earth (1785; expanded to 2 vols. in 1795) and A Theory of Rain (1784). The upraised land of the globe must, he thought, be worn away by atmospheric influences, and the debris be finally deposited in the bed of the sea, where they are consolidated under great pressure; they are then forced upwards by subterranean heat acting with an expansive power, and thereby split and cracked, the fissures at the same time filling with molten mineral matter; and so the process goes on. The formation of rain he ascribed to the mingling of two strata of air of different temperatures and the subsequent condensation of the mixture.
He also wrote Dissertations in Natural Philosophy (1792), Considerations on the Nature of Coal and Culm (1777), and other works. See GEOLOGY.