The man who found time: James Hutton and the discovery of the earth's antiquity

Abstract

It is also a story of the Scottish Enlightenment, which brought together some of the greatest thinkers of the age, from David Hume and Adam Smith to James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. And running through the narrative is a theme about the power of the written word. Repcheck argues that Hutton's work was lost to history because he could not describe his findings in graceful and readable prose -- unlike Darwin's ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, for example, Hutton's one and only book was impenetrable, and consequently its message was never embraced by a general audience. A gripping and enlightening exploration of a little-known man and the science he founded, THE MAN WHO FOUND TIME is also a parable about the power of books to shape the history of ideas.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 63 citations exist upstream.