James Hutton's life and character described by his friend John Playfair.
Date: Written in 1803.
Published in: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Volume 5, Part 3, Pages 39-99, 1805.
Mathematician John Playfair outlines James Hutton's childhood, education and path into medical studies in this biographical account.
He describes Hutton's friendship with James Davie, and details their chemistry experiments. He also mentions a letter Hutton sent to Sir John Hall, in which Hutton says he was becoming 'very fond of studying the surface of the earth'.
Playfair played a pivotal role in getting Hutton's work recognised and in explaining it more clearly than the geologist could himself.
In 1802, five years after Hutton's death, he published 'Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth' - one of the classical contributions to geological literature.
He read his paper about Hutton to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 10 January 1803.