Revolutions in the Earth: James Hutton and the true age of the world by Stephen Baxter, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99, ISBN 0297829750
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the discovery of the Earth’s antiquity by Jack Repcheck, Perseus, $26/£20.50, ISBN 073820692X Reviewed by Douglas Palmer
THE Scottish 18th-century natural philosopher James Hutton was a deist whose theology allowed his mind “to grow giddy looking so far into the abyss of time”. He saw evidence for the existence of a world millions and millions of years old, rather than the few thousand years constrained by literal interpretations of Old…
