James Hutton publishes a revised version of…
1795 CE
James Hutton publishes a revised version of his pioneering Theory of the Earth, which is largely ignored due to its dense presentation.
The Scottish geologist's new theories place him into opposition with the popular Neptunist theories of Abraham Gottlob Werner, that all rocks had precipitated out of a single enormous flood.
Hutton proposes that the interior of the Earth is hot, and that this heat is the engine that drives the creation of new rock: land is eroded by air and water and deposited as layers in the sea; heat then consolidates the sediment into stone, and uplifts it into new lands.
This theory is dubbed "Plutonist" in contrast to the flood-oriented theory.
As well as combating the Neptunists, Hutton also opens up the concept of deep time for scientific purposes, in opposition to Catastrophism.
Rather than accepting that the earth is no more than a few thousand years old, he maintains that the Earth must be much older, with a history extending indefinitely into the distant past.
His main line of argument is that the tremendous displacements and changes he is seeing did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that processes still happening on the Earth in the present day had caused them.
As these processes are very gradual, the Earth needs to be ancient, in order to allow time for the changes.
Before long, scientific inquiries provoked by his claims will push back the age of the earth into the millions of years—still too short when compared with the accepted 4.6 billion year age in the twenty-first century, but a distinct improvement.