THE IMAGE OF THE PLANET EARTH AS AN ACTIVE AGENT IN JAMES HUTTON'S THEORY OF THE EARTH WITH PROOFS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

James Hutton used eight metaphors for the whole of nature in his most famous book: the great flux of nature, the Macrocosmic - Microcosmic analogy, nature as a machine, nature as a book, the fabric of nature, Mother Nature, The Creation, and the globe of the planet, all of which were commonly used by other scientists of his day. In the last case, he seems to have been the person who developed the image of the planet as an active ecological and geophysical agent. This last image is in keeping with the feeling of the rock cycle, and the continuous habitability of the earth. A computerized search of most of the major prose literary works in English including almost the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400), Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471), the Sainted Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), John Webster (1580?-1625?), Sir Izaak Walton (1593-1683), John Bunyan (1628-1688), Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), John Milton (1608-1674), John Dryden (1631-1700), Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), Daniel Defoe (1661?-1731), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), William Congreve (1670-1729), Sir Richard Steele(1672-1729), Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), Henry Fielding (1707-1754), Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Gilbert White (1720-1793), Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), Hutton's friend, Adam Smith (1723-1790), Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), James Boswell (1740-1795), Richard Sheridan (1751-1816), William Blake (1757-1827), Robert Burns (1759-1796), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (1759-1797), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) has found no earlier use of the image of planet earth as an active agent. Beside English, Hutton read and wrote Latin, French and Chinese, and perhaps German. The next step in this study should be an examination of major works available in etext in Latin and French.