Playfair, John Illustrations of The Huttonian Theory of the Earth

Playfair, John Illustrations of The Huttonian Theory of the Earth Edinburgh: Cadell and Davies, 1802. First edition, 8vo (20.5 x 12.5cm), xx 528 pp., modern dark red crushed morocco, toning, faint damp-staining to first signature including title-page (with concomitant small tear to fore margin of title), signatures D and 2I spotted, pencil annotation to p. 177, a few trivial marks elsewhere [Norman 1717; Ward & Carozzi 1797] Qty: (1) Note: Playfair's classic work was a major defence and revision of his friend James Hutton's Theory of the Earth, which was published in 1795 and proposed for the first time that geological phenomena were to be explained by immutable laws rather than supernatural intervention. Playfair 'analysed, modified, and defended the ideas of his close friend Hutton, whose publications suffered from prolixity and obscurity. In lucid prose Playfair supported the timelessness in Hutton's theory, argued that geologists should concern themselves with proximate and not final causes, asserted that natural and divine philosophy were separate but not incompatible activities, coined new terms such as "geological cycle" and "igneous origin", and reported his own work on unconformities of strata, which he regarded as "the most striking monuments of the high antiquity and great revolutions of the globe"' (ODNB).