ABSTRACT
Over the past two hundred years historians of the earth sciences have divided Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century naturalists into two different types, namely, ‘Neptunists’, who believed that the earth was formed by water, and ‘Vulcanists’, who believed it was formed by fire (or heat). For those who have written about Scottish mineralogy and geology, these two typologies usually are recalibrated to fit a series of lively debates that took place between the supporters of the theories promoted by Abraham Gottlob Werner and James Hutton, therein aligning the ‘Wernerians’ with Neptunism and the ‘Huttonians’ with Vulcanism. Though these categories have engendered helpful studies that address what the Wernerians and the Huttonians thought about the large causal processes that shaped the earth, little has been done to explicate what they thought about the mineralogical composition of strata, thereby excluding the relevance of the experimental evidence provided by principle-based chemistry. Such a situation gestures towards a significant historiographical gap, especially since many German, Scottish and Scandinavian naturalists were also able chemists. A cursory look at the work of Werner and Hutton, for example, quickly reveals that both of them used evidence obtained through chemical experimentation to support their claims about the formation of the oldest strata of the earth. The same holds for Sir James Hall’s later defence of Hutton’s theory and Prof Robert Jameson’s vindication of Werner. In short, chemistry provided much of the language and evidence for Edinburgh’s debates over the form and structure of the globe, especially since it
was the mineralogical composition of strata that featured prominently in arguments that addressed the age of the earth.2
