Hutton, James, celebrated geologist, born in Edinburgh; bred to medicine, but devoted himself to agriculture and chemistry, which led on to geology; was the author of the Plutonic theory of the earth, which ascribes the inequalities and other phenomena in the crust of it to the agency of the heat at the centre (1726‒1797).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Hutton, Charles * Huxley, Thomas Henry