John Hutton

“ There is little medium about Roy. He is very good when he is good, and he is very horrid indeed when he is bad. He is a strange admixture of absolute devotion and of utter inconstancy. Nothing will entice him away from John on one day, neither threats nor persuasion. The next day he will cut John dead in the road, with no sign of recognition. He sees John, and he goes slowly and deliberately out of his way to pass John by, without a look or a sniff. He comes up-stairs every morning when his master’s shaving-water is produced. He watches intently the entire course of his master’s toilet ”

“ Fitton, in 1839, wrote in the Edinburgh Review, 'The original work of Hutton (in two volumes) is in fact so scarce that no very great number of our readers can have seen it. No copy exists at present in the libraries of the Royal Society, the Linnean, or even the Geological Society of London [26] !' He also points out that Hutton's work, and even the more lucid Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory, [Pg 31] were almost unknown on the continent, owing to the isolation of Great Britain during the war ”

“ The New-York Beauty. The Sleeping Nymph. A Tea Party of Young Ladies, with a Servant Negro Girl. The Salem Beauty. Maternal Affection, or a Lady with two beautiful Children. The Boston Beauty. Sir Charles Grandison and Miss Harriet Byron. Charlotte weeping at the Tomb of Werter.—Humphreys and Mendoza, the celebrated English Boxers. The domestic Cottager, at the spinning wheel. The venerable John S. Hutton, who lately died in Philadelphia, aged 108 years and 4 months, drest with the same cloathes which he wore when living, with his own cane, pipe, tobacco-box, &c. ”

“ In 1851 he married, and accepted the post of editor of the Unitarian magazine, 'The Inquirer,' which was offered him by the proprietor, R. Kinder. John Langton Sanford [q. v.] was associated with him in the editorship in 1852, and among the contributors were his brother-in-law, William Caldwell Roscoe [q. v.] , and Bagehot. At a time when the traditions of Priestley and Thomas Belsham were still dominant among the Unitarians, Hutton advocated many innovations, and in consequence aroused the disapproval of the more conservative. ”

“ It is laid down in Dr Hutton's theory, that the surface of the earth is perpetually changed by the detritus of the land; and that from the - 497 - materials thus afforded, new horizontal strata are perpetually formed at the bottom of the sea. If this be true, and if the alternations of decay and renovation have been often repeated, it is certain, that the figure of the earth, whatever it may have originally been, must be brought at length to coincide with the spheroid of equilibrium. ”

“ The Huttonian Theory is, indeed, the only one which possesses the means of reconciling the elevation of the strata with their horizontal deposition, and which is entitled to consider stratification, in whatever plane it may be, as originally the work of the ocean. The geologists who attach themselves exclusively to the action of water, will never be able to extend the dominion of that element so far as Dr Hutton has done, by combining it with fire. ”

“ Townsend knew a great deal about diplomatic history and about war by land and sea, as must every man who has lived long in India; Hutton's mind was little occupied with such things. Home politics, as I have said, were his field and had his deepest concern, while Townsend took in these no more than an ordinary interest. Again, Hutton was deeply interested in psychology and the study of the mind, whereas what interested Townsend most was what might be called the scenery of life and politics. Townsend looked upon life as a drama played in a great theatre and seen from the stalls. ”

“ Such, according to Dr Hutton's theory, are the changes which the daily operations of waste have produced on the surface of the globe. These operations, inconsiderable if taken separately, become great, by conspiring all to the same end, never counteracting one another, but proceeding, through a period of indefinite extent, continually in the same direction. Thus every thing descends, nothing returns upward; the hard and solid bodies every where dissolve, and the loose and soft no where consolidate. ”

“ Hutton’s letter eulogizes the count in the highest terms. “When he awakes in the morning, he is all sweetness, calmness, tender harmoniousness with those about him; and, all the day long, he is busied in doing and contriving the kindest offices for mankind.” ”

“ That was all very well for a subordinate and a younger man, but it would not have been half so satisfactory in the case of an equal partnership. Hutton was occupied with pure literature—especially poetry—and with theology and with home politics. Townsend, on the other hand, though he was a great reader and lover of books, and a man of real religious feeling, was specially interested in Asia and the Asiatic spirit and foreign affairs. ”

“ It forms a complete contrast to the theory of Dr Hutton, where nothing is to be seen beyond the continuation of the present order; where no latent seed of evil threatens final destruction to the whole; and where the - 486 - movements are so perfect, that they can never terminate of themselves. This is surely a view of the world more suited to the dignity of Nature, and the wisdom of its Author, than has yet been offered by any other system of cosmology. ”

“ The quantity of hornblende and siliceous schistus, necessary to be decomposed, in order to produce the coal strata presently existing, is enormous, and would lead to an estimate of what is worn away from the primeval mountains, far exceeding any thing that Dr Hutton has supposed. It is true, that Mr Kirwan, never at all embarrassed about preserving a similitude between nature as she is now, and as she was heretofore, lays it down, that the part of the primeval mountains which is worn away, contained much more carbon than the part which is left behind. ”

“ A work of such variety and extent cannot be carried to perfection by the efforts of an individual. Ages may be required to fill up the bold outline which Dr Hutton has traced with so masterly a hand; to detach the parts more completely from the general mass ”

“ A theory is never more unfairly dealt with, than when those parts are separated which were meant to support one another, and each left to stand or fall by itself. This, however, is precisely what is done in the present instance; for Dr Hutton's theory of granite would not deserve a moment's consideration, if it were so inartificially constructed, as to suppose that granite was originally fluid, and yet to point out no means of hindering this fluid from diffusing itself over the strata, and settling in a horizontal plane. ”

“ This liberty is not more necessary to Dr Hutton than to other theorists. No ingenuity has been able to reconcile the natural history of the globe with the opinion of its recent origin; and accordingly the cosmologies of Kirwan and De Luc, though contrived with more mineralogical skill, are not less forced and unsatisfactory than those of Burnet and Whiston. ”

“ At Herrnhut the leader was the Lutheran, Christian David; at Fetter Lane, James Hutton, the Anglican clergyman's son; and in Yorkshire, the clergyman, Benjamin Ingham, who never joined the Moravian Church at all. He had, like the Wesleys and Whitefield, taken part in the Evangelical Revival. He was one of the Oxford Methodists, and had belonged to the Holy Club. He had sailed with John Wesley on his voyage to America, had met the Brethren on board the Simmonds, and had learned to know them more thoroughly in Georgia. ”

“ It is only just to add that for the violent prejudices excited by some of his contemporaries against Hutton's writings—as being directed against the theological tenets of the day and therefore subversive of religion—there is really no foundation whatever; and every candid reader of the Theory of the Earth must acquit its author of any such design. The passage quoted on page 51 could only have been written by Lyell at a time when he was still unacquainted with Hutton's works, and was misled by common report concerning them. ”

“ As John Carey held no official position, he was able to aim his bullets wherever he pleased; and, glowing with patriotic zeal, he first gave a concise epitome of the "History of the Brethren," and then dealt with burning problems of the day. If the magazine did nothing else, it at least caused men to think. Among the contributors was Bishop Alexander Hassé. He had visited certain places in Ireland—Arva, Billies, and Drumargan—where once the Brethren had been strong ”

“ The inclusion of one heterogeneous substance within another, as happens among the spars and drusens, found so commonly in mineral veins, often leads to a similar conclusion. Thus, from a specimen of chalcedony, including in it a piece of calcareous spar, Dr Hutton has derived a very ingenious and satisfactory proof, that these two substances were perfectly soft at the same time, and mutually affected each other at the moment of their concretion. ”

“ If we examine the whole parish, we cannot produce one old witch; but we have plenty of young, who exercise a powerful influence over us. Should the ladies accuse the harsh epithet, they will please to consider, I allow them, what of all things they most wish for, power, therefore the balance is in my favor.
If we pass through the planitary worlds, we shall be able to muster up two conjurers, who endeavoured to shine with the stars. The first, John Walton, who was so busy in calling the nativity of others, he forgot his own. ”

“ Unfortunately, Hutton's theory was linked to the extravagancies of what was known at that day as [Pg 18] 'Vulcanism' or 'Plutonism,' in contradistinction to the 'Neptunism' of Werner. Hutton, while rejecting the Wernerian notion of "the aqueous precipitation of basalt," maintained the equally fanciful idea that the consolidation of all strata—clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestones and even rock-salt—must be ascribed to the action of heat, and that even the formation of chalk-flints and the silicification of fossil wood were due to the injection of molten silica! ”

“ Charles Hutton, the mathematician, was born in Newcastle in 1737. He began life as a pitman; but, receiving an injury to his arm, he turned his attention to books, and taught in his native town for some years, becoming later Professor of Mathematics in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
John Brand, the antiquary and historian of Newcastle, was born at Washington, County Durham, but came to Newcastle as a child. After attending the Grammar School, he went to Oxford, by the aid of his master, the Rev. ”

“ Ferber, Bergman, De Luc, Saussure, Dolomieu, are those on whom Dr Hutton chiefly relied; and it is on their observations and his own that his system is founded. If it be said, that only a small part of the earth's surface has yet been surveyed, and described - 515 - with such accuracy as is found in the writers just named, it may be answered, that the earth is constructed with such a degree of uniformity, that a tract of no very large extent may afford instances of all the leading facts that we can ever observe in the mineral kingdom. ”

“ In his Geological Essays, Mr Kirwan says, that "some geologists, as Buffon, and of late Dr Hutton, have excluded calcareous earth from the number of the primeval, asserting the masses of it we at present behold to proceed from shell-fish. But, in addition to the unfounded supposition, that shell-fish, or any animals, possess the power of producing any simple earth, these philosophers should have considered, that, before the existence of any fish, the stony masses that inclose the bason of the sea, must have existed ”

“ Bagehot, again, was a great leader-writer; so were Robert Low and Sir Henry Mayne; and so also was Hutton. But these men, great publicists as they were, never attained to quite Townsend's verbal accomplishment. I fully admit that many of them could, on occasion, write with far greater political judgment, and with greater learning, and with greater force and eloquence. But where Townsend excelled them and was easily first was in his power of dramatic expression and what can only be described as verbal fascination. No one could excite the mind and exalt the imagination as he did. ”

“ Hutton, Richard Holt (1826-1897) .—Essayist and miscellaneous writer, was brought up as a Unitarian, and for some time was a preacher of that body, but coming under the influence of F.D. Maurice and others of his school, joined the Church of England. He was a frequent contributor to various magazines and reviews, and assisted Walter Bagehot in ed. the National Review. In 1861 he became joint-proprietor and ed. ”

“ Nathan Hutton is a well remembered old postilion. He was a tall, spare man, and lived in a small log house on the roadside, a short distance west of the old Johnson tavern, and four and a half miles east of Brownsville. At the foot of the hill below his house, he re-enforced the coaches with his postilion both ways, east and west, up Colley’s hill, going west, and the equally long hill, coming east from that point. When he wanted a man or horse to be faithful to duty he exhorted him to “stand by his ’tarnal integrity.” ”

“ Hutton was a clever, cultured, and—when he pleased—a wholly delightful companion. Occasionally on Sundays the pair made little excursions together, visited the City churches and quaint bits of Old London, or ventured a dash into the country, or up the river.
“You say Friday is a holiday in your office, Shafto,” he remarked one evening; “how would you like to come for a prowl, and see what we can find in the Caledonian Market? It’s an out-of-the-way place, where once a week all manner of rubbish is shot, and now and then you pick up a really staggering bargain.” ”