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that it is only by visiting and studying these stupen dous works that he can form an adequate conception of the crust of the globe, and of its mode of formation; unless, of course, he turns to that true prophet of the Mountain Top, Abraham Gottlob Werner.
    We always praise the mind that leads us out of chaos, no matter the route taken, nor the country reached. But Werner, of course, had his disagreements. His greatest rival to the title of the Father of Modern Geology was another Scot, Dr James Hutton, a dour, meticulous, incomprehensible man, whose theories required an interpreter in his own tongue to be understood. That interpreter was a man named Playfair – if only we all had such interpreters, Dr Bunyon notwithstanding – a lucid, elegant writer whose simplifications allowed Hutton’s theory to challenge even the order of Werner’s categories. But I am an old obscurantist, a stickler for sticky phrases and muddy texts, and turn for once to the original, Hutton’s perhaps mockingly titled Theory of the Earth.
    Hutton’s genius lay in his understanding of accumulation. He sensed that the process of life involves an almost endless series of revisions, the making and unmaking and remaking of Matter, which itself is the result of an age of minor transformations. He declared that it was ‘in vain to look for anything higher in the originof the earth than the continuation of some earlier process; the result, therefore, of our present inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’.
    He argued that the earth’s crust was the product of sedimentation transfused by heat into new matter. He placed great faith in the strength of fire, a faith he felt no need to justify by experiment. The world around us, he argued, has overflowed from a great furnace, a continual power, an endless shifting. The rocks we see bear the brunt of their fusion. We come burning hither, caught in the fire of some transformation; he simply recorded the process, as accurately as he could. He had little interest in marking the genesis of any thing   – contenting himself with an account of how everything had undergone some modification. He acknowledged no beginnings and no ends, only the steadiness of change. By some trick of fate his masterpiece, The Theory of the Earth, survived him unfinished. Playfair unaccountably never tidied up the remains; and only a century later were those dormant manuscripts, beginning characteristically on chapter four, offered to the public.
    These two between them divided the field. The NEPTUNISTS followed Werner and placed their faith in the sea. The PLUTONISTS drew their authority from Hutton and believed in fire. The clergy distrusted Hutton. He took no account of the Bible; and his theories surrendered little space for the suddenness of Divine Creation. His world took shape in an endless moiling and broiling and left no breath for the lightness of instant Light. The Neptunists, for their part, ridiculed his faith in fire. Jameson declared simply (always the virtue of their kind!):
    The spheroidal figure of the earth is a proof of its original fluidity. This important conclusion was never disputed; the only question has been, Whether this fluidity was the effect of Fire or Water.
    Rocks which have been formed or altered by the action of Heat are most distinctly different from those that constitute the great mass of the crust of the globe; consequently this fluidity cannot be attributed to the agency of heat.
    The Church favoured Werner; and the muddle left behind by Hutton’s obscurities dissuaded interest. Jameson’s eloquence also had its effect. He founded the Wernerian Society and became himself a respected teacher, numbering among his students both Robert Stephenson, perfecter of the locomotive, and Charles Darwin, who needs no elucidation. Hutton, always patient with earthly processes, bided his time.
    Eventually, in 1830 another Scotsman, Charles Lyell, declared the hand of the