ABSTRACT
Despite the brilliance of its ideas, Hutton’s work seemed doomed to be buried quietly and unobtrusively in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. There were many reasons for its cold reception. Hutton was a relatively modest man and would have been content merely with addressing the Society and with having his views in print. He was simple and stubborn by nature with strong likes and dislikes and dressed in the garb of a Quaker with the addition of an old-fashioned cocked hat. As a member of the City’s distinguished social circle he was renowned for his joviality and powers of ordinary conversation but, unlike Werner, he did not impress his beliefs by the inner vitality of his personality. It is characteristic of him that he felt and left his work to speak for itself by the power of its own simple logic. When it came to self-advertisement and the conversion of others he was clearly less interested and for all his scientific acuteness it is highly probable that he was rather unworldly in these respects and in many of his more ordinary doings, as the following reminiscence tends to suggest.
