earth, according to a plan having no natural termination, but calculated to endure as long as those beneficent purposes, for which the whole is destined, shall continue to exist" (1805, 56–57).

Playfair: A Boswell with a Difference

This long exegesis of time's cycle and its meaning for Hutton has left one essential question unanswered. If I am right, and the Hutton of our textbooks is the Hutton of history turned on his head, why have we read him so wrongly, and with such consistency in error? How could we have taken such a brilliant man, driven by such a powerful vision of time's cycle imposed upon the earth to solve a problem in final causality, and reconstructed him as a modern empiricist, a field geologist dedicated only to efficient causes? Geikie may have perpetrated this myth, but how did he get away with it? People are not so stupid. Could they possibly have read Hutton, however blinded by expectation, and found Geikie's version within? The answer must lie, in large part, with Hutton's legendary unreadability.⁴ By long tradition, and by simple unavailability, geologists do not read Hutton himself. Nineteenth-century Britain was blessed with a number of fine scientists who were also superb literary stylists—Charles Lyell and T. H. Huxley in particular. But the best writer of all may have been John Playfair, professor of mathematics at Edinburgh, dedicated amateur geologist, and intimate friend of Hutton. After Hutton's death, Playfair decided to rescue his friend's ideas from their poor presentation by publishing

4.1 have never found Hutton nearly so obtuse or infelicitous as tradition dictates. I will not defend the rambling thousand-page 1795 Theory with its endless quota- tions in French (one runs for forty-one pages), but I find the 1788 version reason- ably crisp and concise, with occasional lines of literary brilliance. Still, the historical record speaks for itself. Lyell admitted that he had never managed to read it all. Even Kirwan, Hutton's dogged, almost frantic critic (he opposed Hutton in whole books), never read all of both volumes—for many pages of his personal copy are uncut (see Davies, 1969).