評論
打印
5 THE STONE-BREAKERS
5 敲石頭的人們
At just the time that Henry Cavendish was completing his experiments in London, four hundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of concluding moment was about to take place with the death of James Hutton. This was bad news for Hutton, of course, but good news for science as it cleared the way for a man named John Playfair to rewrite Hutton's work without fear of embarrassment.
正當亨利·卡文迪許在倫敦完成試驗的時候，在650公里之外的愛丁堡，另一個重大時刻隨著詹姆斯·赫頓的去世而即將到來。這對赫頓來說當然是壞消息，但對科學界來說卻是個好消息，因為它為一個名叫約翰·普萊費爾的人無愧地改寫赫頓的作品鋪平了道路。
Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation, a delight in company, and without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form that anyone could begin to understand. He was, as one biographer observed with an all but audible sigh, "almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments." Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber. Here he is in his 1795 masterwork, A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations , discussing . . . something:
赫頓毫無疑問是個目光敏銳、非常健談的人，一個愉快的伙伴。他在了解地球那神秘而又緩慢的形成過程方面是無與倫比的。不幸的是，他不會以人人都能基本理解的形式寫下他的見解。有一位傳記作家長嘆一聲，說，他"幾乎完全不懂得怎么使用語言"。他差不多每次寫一行字就要想睡覺。在他1795年的杰作《地球論以及證據與說明》中，他是這樣討論......某個問題的：
The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials, not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in ascending from the present, we consider as the third, and which had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea, while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean.
我們居住的世界不是由組成當時地球的直接前身的物質所構成的，而是從當今往前追溯，由我們認為是第三代的地球的物質所構成的，那個地球出現在陸地露出海面之前，而我們現今的陸地當時還在海水底下。
