Theory of the Earth

James Hutton's 1788 paper (expanded to a two-volume work in 1795) is the founding text of geological uniformitarianism — the principle that the same physical processes operating today have, over deep time, produced the present-day geological record. Hutton's famous formulation that the geological record displays 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end' is the conceptual displacement of the early-modern biblical-chronological framework by what would become the geological consensus. The displacement of Ussher's 4004 BCE chronology by Hutton's deep-time geology is the principal nineteenth-century transformation of the natural-philosophical context for the antediluvian world.