'The wildness of many of his theoretical views, however, went far to counterbalance the utility of the additional facts which he collected from observation. He who could perceive in geology nothing but the ordinary operation of actual causes, carried on in the same manner through infinite ages, without the trace of a beginning or the prospect of an end, must have surveyed them through the medium of a preconceived hypothesis alone[24].'
John Playfair, the brilliant author of the Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory, died in 1819; under happier conditions his able work might have done for Inorganic Evolution what his great master failed to accomplish; but the dead weight of prejudice and the dread of anything that seemed to savour of infidelity was, at the time of the great European struggle against revolutionary France, too great to be removed even by his lucid statements and eloquent advocacy. James Hall and Leonard Horner, two faithful disciples of Hutton, who had joined the infant Geological Society, forsook it early, the former leaving it on account of the quarrel with the Royal Society, the latter retaining his fellowship and interest, but going to live at Edinburgh. Greenough, 'The Objector General,' as he was called, was left, fanatically opposing any attempt to stem the current that had set so strongly in favour of Wernerism and Neptunism, and the Catastrophic doctrines which all thought to be necessary conclusions from them. The great heroic workers of that day—while they were laying well and truly the foundations of historical geology—were, one and all, indifferent to, or violently opposed to, the Huttonian teaching. Neither Fitton nor John Phillips, who at a later date showed sympathy with evolutionary doctrines, were the men to fight the battle of an unpopular cause.
Attempts have been made by both Playfair and Fitton to explain how it was that Hutton's teaching failed to arrest the attention it deserved. The former justly asserted that the world was tired of the performances issued under the title of 'theories of the earth'; and that the condensed nature of Hutton's writings, with their 'embarrassment of reasoning and obscurity of style[25]' are largely responsible for the neglect into which they fell.
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, were almost unknown on the continent, owing to the isolation of Great Britain during the war; and he even suggests that the popularity of Playfair in this country may have not improbably led to the neglect of the original work of Hutton[27].
On the continent, indeed, the authority of Cuvier was supreme, and in his Essay on the Theory of the Earth, prefixed to his Opus magnum—the Ossemens Fossiles—the great naturalist threw the whole weight of his influence into the scale of Catastrophism. He maintained that a series of tremendous cataclysms had affected the globe—the last being the Noachian deluge—and that the floods of water that overspread the earth, during each of these events, had buried the various groups of animals, now extinct, that had been successively created.
If anything had been wanted in England to support and confirm the views that were then supposed to be the only ones in harmony with the Scriptures, it was found in the great authority of Cuvier. As Zittel justly says, Cuvier's theory of 'World-Catastrophies'—'which afforded a certain scientific basis for the Mosaic account of the "Flood," was received with special cordiality in England, for there, more than in any other country, theological doctrines had always affected geological conceptions[28].' Britain, which had produced the great philosopher, Hutton, had now become the centre of the bitterest opposition to his teachings!
But 'the darkest hour of night is that which precedes the dawn,' and while the forces of reaction in this country appeared to be triumphant over Hutton's teaching, there was in preparation, to use the words of Darwin, a 'grand work' ... 'which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science.'