James Hutton

James Hutton, better known as the father of geology, came to be known as a great man of exploration. He started his career exploring his surroundings and started searching for the unknown answers to the mysteries of our planet Earth at a young age. Hutton was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland into a wealthy family of three sisters and a brother, who sadly did not make it past adolescence. His father, William Hutton, was a very successful businessman, but unfortunately passed away when James was just three years old. His mother, Sarah Balfour, was a great motivator for James because she's the first person to insist on James going to high school in Edinburgh. In high school, Hutton became interested in mathematics and chemistry, and this is where we now see Hutton's road starting to be paved. At just 14 years old, Hutton attended college in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he studied and received his college degree in law. After working with George Chalmers as an apprentice in law, Hutton was told law was not for him. Chalmers pushed Hutton to do something else with his life. Hutton moved on after three years working with his degree to going back to school for something that he found much more interesting. That was chemistry. At this time, the University of Paris did not offer chemistry as a subject degree, so therefore Hutton had to settle for a doctor of medicine. For this field had a little something to do with chemistry. After receiving his degree in practicing medicine, he became a father of James Smeaton Hutton, who received only financial support from Hutton and grew up to work as a postman. After Paris and London, Hutton went back home to Edinburgh, where he partnered up with a close friend of his, James Davey, and they worked side by side studying chemistry and experiments with salamoniac found in lead. During the time of studying chemistry, Hutton also started to become interested in the land in which he was working with. One of the many farms his father owned was the beginning to Hutton's interest in geology. He also wrote a book about different techniques working with agriculture and farming systems. James started studying the minerals and rocks he came across in his environment and was hungry for more information. Hutton started taking tours throughout Scotland and other countries with a companion of his, George Maxwell Clark, who was an ancestor of the famous James Clerk Maxwell, and studied further into the Earth. Sure enough, Hutton ended up discovering the Earth's mysteries to the people at the time. First of all, he discovered there were different layers of the Earth and that the heat from the center of the Earth was causing tectonic movements with the land that we know of as continents. He was discovering that, judging by layering patterns of rock and sediment, that the Earth was quite a bit older than people believed at this time. By quite a bit older, we mean much, much older than people thought. This opened up for the prediction that evolution did in fact occur because of the allotted time there was room for mutations to occur within different species, perhaps even including ourselves, the human being. Hutton wrote an impressive amount of books and theories, but most of which were not published until after his death in 1797 due to what was believed to be kidney failure. But today we use his theories to study the ground beneath us.