ABSTRACT
Over the past two hundred years eighteenth-century personalities like Hall have attracted the attention of scholars seeking to understand the history of the theories that shaped the way that nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century scientists viewed the world. Even though he was born in 1761, much of the literature available about Hall seeks to identify how his understanding of chemistry harmonised with the Chemical Revolution and how his thoughts on the alignment of strata (stratigraphy) contributed to the long stretches of time necessitated by the Darwinian Revolution. Although this approach is useful and informative, it does little to explain the pedagogical, experimental or methodological context that produced Hutton, Hall and their contemporaries. Moreover, since the ‘revolutions’ historiographic model often concentrates on grand movements of scientific ideas, the day-to-day practices of naturalists and experimentally-minded physicians have not received adequate attention. This state of affairs might not seem that problematic until one considers that a chemist like Hall fused his knowledge of Lavoisier’s publications with the information that he had learned at the University of Edinburgh during the early 1780s. When he accepted Lavoisier’s oxygen theory and Hutton’s theory of the earth, Hall built on the experimental techniques and classification methods that had been taught to him as a student. But what, exactly, were these practices? How did they compare to those used by other European chemists, or even other natural historians? Such questions, though important, are
seldom asked of late eighteenth-century thinkers, especially those who have been deemed irrelevant to the various revolution models that still influence the history of science, philosophy and even culture.
