萬物簡史 第73期:敲石頭的人們(5)

In 1785, Hutton worked his ideas up into a longpaper, which was read at consecutive meetings of theRoyal Society of Edinburgh. It attracted almost nonotice at all. It's not hard to see why. Here, in part,is how he presented it to his audience:

1785年，赫頓把他的看法寫成一篇很長的論文，并在愛丁堡皇家學會的幾次會議上宣讀。它幾乎沒有引起大家的注意。原因不難找到。一定程度上，他就是這樣向聽眾宣讀論文的：

In the one case, the forming cause is in the bodywhich is separated; for, after the body has beenactuated by heat, it is by the reaction of the proper matter of the body, that the chasm whichconstitutes the vein is formed. In the other case, again, the cause is extrinsic in relation to thebody in which the chasm is formed. There has been the most violent fracture and divulsion;but the cause is still to seek; and it appears not in the vein; for it is not every fracture anddislocation of the solid body of our earth, in which minerals, or the proper substances ofmineral veins, are found.

在一種情況下，形成的力量在獨立存在的物體內(nèi)部。這是因為，這個物體被熱激活以后，是通過物體的特有物質(zhì)的反應，形成了構(gòu)成脈絡的裂口。在另一種情況下，還是一樣，相對于在其內(nèi)部形成脈絡的物體來說，原因是外在的。已經(jīng)發(fā)生了最猛烈的斷裂和扯裂;但是那個原因還在努力;它不是出現(xiàn)在脈絡里，因為它不是在我們地球堅實的物體內(nèi)部--那里找得到礦物或礦脈的特定物質(zhì)--的每條縫隙和每個斷層里。

Needless to say, almost no one in the audience had the faintest idea what he was talking about.Encouraged by his friends to expand his theory, in the touching hope that he might somehowstumble onto clarity in a more expansive format, Hutton spent the next ten years preparinghis magnum opus, which was published in two volumes in 1795.

不用說，聽眾里幾乎誰也不懂他在說些什么。朋友們鼓勵他把他的理論展開一下，希望他能在更大的篇幅里碰巧講得清楚一點。這是很感人的。赫頓花了此后的10年時間準備他的巨著，并且于1795年以兩卷本出版。

Together the two books ran to nearly a thousand pages and were, remarkably, worse than evenhis most pessimistic friends had feared. Apart from anything else, nearly half the

completed work now consisted of quotations from French sources, still in the original French. Athird volume was so unenticing that it wasn't published until 1899, more than a century afterHutton's death, and the fourth and concluding volume was never published at all. Hutton'sTheory of the Earth is a strong candidate for the least read important book in science (or atleast would be if there weren't so many others). Even Charles Lyell, the greatest geologist of thefollowing century and a man who read everything, admitted he couldn't get through it.

這兩本書加起來有將近1000頁，寫得比他最悲觀的朋友擔心的還要糟糕，真是不可思議。此外，這部作品的內(nèi)容將近一半引自法國的資料，仍然以法文的形式出現(xiàn)。第三卷非常缺少吸引力，直到1899年才出版，那是在赫頓去世一個多世紀以后。第四卷即最后一卷根本沒有出版。赫頓的《地球論》很有資格當選為讀者最少的重要科學著作(要是沒有大量別的這樣的書的話，那就可以這樣說)。連19世紀最偉大的地質(zhì)學家、什么書都看過的查爾斯•萊爾也承認，這本書他實在讀不下去。