Agricultural History Review, Volume 42 Part 1 (1994), pp. 38–48

In this article, the unpublished manuscript 'Elements of Agriculture' by the earth scientist James Hutton (1726-1797) is analysed to review both its content and its contextual significance in relation to contemporary knowledge on agricultural science in eighteenth-century Scotland. Examination of Hutton's agricultural manuscript shows him to have linked his geological and individual fanning interests with matters of Scotland's husbandry. His work was part also of that improvement culture within eighteenth-century Scotland which sought to understand agricultural practice through science and to transform the agrarian economy through subjecting it, like the science on which it was based, to the test of 'rational principles'. The idea of continuing fertility and repair is seen to be essential to his geological Theory of the Earth and his a priori reasoning in the 'Elements of Agriculture'. 

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