Hutton had told the Royal Society that it was his purpose to “form some estimate with regard to the time the globe of this Earth has existed.” But after Jedburgh and Siccar Point what estimate could there be? “The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which … had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean,” he wrote. “Here are three distinct successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our measurement of time,
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