“We find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end.”
Theory of the Earth (1795)
James Hutton était un géologue écossais connu pour sa formulation de l'uniformitarisme et l'école du plutonisme. C'est l'un des pères de la géologie moderne. Wikipedia
“We find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end.”
Theory of the Earth (1795)
This passage suggests that more than than 50 years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Hutton anticipated Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Source: An Investigation into the Principles of Knowledge (1794)
Source: Theory of the Earth (Paper, published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785)