James Hutton

Résumé du livre

Scientists currently think that the Earth is four and a half billion years old. Until the eighteenth century, however, the Christian world firmly believed that the Earth was created about 4000 BC. James Hutton (1726-97) was the man whose pioneering fieldwork proved that this was not so. A leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, he not only established that the Earth is immensely old, but in the process also saw the possibility of both evolution and natural selection -- some fifteen years before Darwin was born. This book pays tribute to the man and his work, confirming him as the founder of modern geology. Book jacket.