In the 1990s, when the Geological Gallery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York was being redesigned, a series of moulds was made of classic geological sites and these were cast in fibreglass and installed in the geology exhibition. While there one can gaze at a piece of Scotland: Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast, to be precise, which is one of the sites in the world that historians of geology would wish to visit to pay homage to the early geological fathers. Recently I was in New York and made my way to the gallery. I have to confess that I have never visited the real Siccar Point. Nevertheless its impact on me was palpable – I had to sit down in the gallery, and I gazed at the structure, identifying the almost upright beds overlain unconformably by almost horizontal beds tilted at a low angle. I realised that perhaps I was experiencing a similar sensation to that of the great gentleman geologist James Hutton (1726–1797) when he first saw the actual site over two hundred years earlier.

THE GENESIS OF A NEW THEORY OF THE EARTH

Sitting in the parlour of his Edinburgh house at St John's Hill on the afternoon of 7 March 1785, the regal-looking gentleman would have been somewhat apprehensive. It was nearly teatime but I suspect he would not have wanted to eat much; he had more pressing matters on his mind.