On 26 March 1797, James Hutton, the Scottish chemist and geologist, died.
Hutton is regarded as a pioneer of modern geology. At the time of his research people still widely accepted The Bible's account that the world was only about 6,000 years old. Geologists believed that rock layers had been laid down during the Biblical floods. Hutton refused to accept that one single event was responsible for the formation of the world as we know it. In his work, Theory of the Earth (1795), he posited that the Earth's crust had been created through a continuous, gradual process called "uniformitarianism".
