matter to expand "with amazing force" (1788, 266), producing extensive uplift and generating new continents at the sites of old oceans (while the eroded areas of old continents become new oceans).

Each stage automatically entails the next. The weight of accumulating sediments generates enough heat to consolidate, and then to uplift, the strata; the steep topography of uplift must then, perforce, erode as waves and rivers do their work. Time's cycle rules the world machine of erosion, deposition, consolidation, and uplift; continents and oceans change places in a slow choreography that can never end, or even age, so long as higher powers maintain the current order of nature's laws. Deep time becomes a simple deduction from the operation of the world machine.

The Hutton of Legend

Charles Lyell's self-serving rewrite of geology's history (see Chapter 4) demanded a certain type of hero, and Hutton best fitted the requirements. Simple chauvinism decreed a British character, and Hutton prevailed (even though nearly half his Theory of the Earth presents long, untranslated quotations from French sources). Hutton was never considered a major figure by continental geologists. I don't think that he even had much influence upon the great flowering and professionalization of British geology following the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807. For this first generation devoted its attention to the very kind of historical inquiry that Hutton eschewed (see the last section of this chapter). Hutton's paramountcy fulfilled a later need.