By 1827, he had abandoned law and embarked on a geological career that would result in fame and the general acceptance of uniformitarianism, a working out of the idea proposed by James Hutton a few decades earlier.

The central argument in Principles was that the present is the key to the past – a concept of the Scottish Enlightenment which David Hume had stated as " all inferences from experience suppose ... that the future will resemble the past ", and James Hutton had described when he wrote in 1788 that " from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter.

Other names connected to the city include Max Born, physicist and Nobel laureate ; Charles Darwin, the biologist who discovered natural selection ; David Hume, a philosopher, economist and historian ; James Hutton, regarded as the " Father of Geology "; John Napier inventor of logarithms ; chemist and one of the founders of thermodynamics Joseph Black ; pioneering medical researchers Joseph Lister and James Young Simpson ; chemist and discoverer of the element nitrogen, Daniel Rutherford ; mathematician and developer of the Maclaurin series, Colin Maclaurin and Ian Wilmut, the geneticist involved in the cloning of Dolly the sheep just outside Edinburgh.

Natural historians, such as Humbolt, James Hutton and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck ( among others ) laid the foundations of the modern ecological sciences.

The theory was proposed in 1795 by James Hutton, a Scottish physician and gentleman farmer, and was later incorporated into Charles Lyell's theory of uniformitarianism.

James Hutton is often viewed as the first modern geologist.

A fundamental principle of geology advanced by the 18th century Scottish physician and geologist James Hutton, is that " the present is the key to the past.

The focus of the Scottish Enlightenment ranged from intellectual and economic matters to the specifically scientific as in the work of William Cullen, physician and chemist, James Anderson, an agronomist, Joseph Black, physicist and chemist, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.

Visiting in 1787, the geologist James Hutton found his first example of an unconformity there and this spot is one of the most famous places in the study of geology.

* 1726 – James Hutton, Scottish geologist ( d. 1797 )

James Hutton ( Edinburgh, 3 June 1726 OS – 26 March 1797 ) was a Scottish physician, geologist, naturalist, chemical manufacturer and experimental agriculturalist.

James Hutton was born in Edinburgh on 3 June 1726 OS as one of five children of William Hutton, a merchant who was Edinburgh City Treasurer, but who died in 1729 when James was still young.

Around 1747 he had a son by a Miss Edington, and though he gave his child James Smeaton Hutton financial assistance, he had little to do with the boy who went on to become a post-office clerk in London.

After his degree Hutton returned to London, then in mid-1750 went back to Edinburgh and resumed chemical experiments with close friend, James Davie.

* James Hutton Institute

* Jack Repcheck: The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity.

* Stephen Baxter: Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time.

Published in the UK as Revolutions in the Earth: James Hutton and the True Age of the World.

* James Hutton. org. uk, links to James HuttonThe Man and The James Hutton Trail.

Her father, James Upton, was the Upton mentioned by Hawthorne in the famous introduction to the Scarlet Letter as one of those who came into the old custom house to do business with him as the surveyor of the port.

Walter Quin, tutor to the future Charles I, worked hard on multilingual anagrams on the name of father James.

Watterson was born in Washington, D. C., where his father, James G. Watterson ( born 1932 ), worked as a patent examiner while going to George Washington University Law School before becoming a patent attorney in 1960.

* Peter Jay's appointment as British Ambassador to the U. S. by his father in law, the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.

Following William and Mary's accession to the throne, England involved itself in the War of the Grand Alliance primarily to prevent a French invasion restoring Mary's father, James II.

His father, James Foe, a member of the Butchers ' Company, was a prosperous tallow chandler.

Charles hoped to unite the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland into a new single kingdom, fulfilling the dream of his father, James VI of Scotland and I of England.

James is the father of psychology in America but he also made contributions to educational psychology.

His father, James Roosevelt, and his mother, Sara Ann Delano, were sixth cousins and both were from wealthy old New York families.

When James V finally managed to escape from the custody of the regents with the aid of his redoubtable mother in 1528, he once again set about subduing the rebellious Highlands, Western and Northern isles, as his father had had to do.

Persistent suggestions, based on a similarity of hair colour, have been made that Harry's father is actually James Hewitt, with whom Diana had an affair.

His father, a captain in the Royal Navy, commanded the 60-gun HMS Pembroke, with James Cook as his sailing master, during the 1758 siege of Louisbourg.

His father, James Madison, Sr. ( 1723 – 1801 ), was a tobacco planter who grew up on a plantation, then called Mount Pleasant, in Orange County, Virginia, which he had inherited upon reaching adulthood.

She named her firstborn after her father James Knox.

When the parents took James to church to be baptized, the father Samuel refused to declare his belief in Christianity, and the minister refused to baptize the child.

" On June 26, 1860, Flora gave birth to a son, Philip St. George Cooke Stuart, but his father changed the name to James Ewell Brown Stuart, Jr. (" Jimmie "), in late 1861 out of disgust with his father-in-law.

Voight is the father of actors Angelina Jolie and James Haven.

Bentine was born Michael James Bentin in Watford, Hertfordshire, of a Peruvian father, Adam Bentin, and a British mother, Florence Dawkins, and grew up in Folkestone, Kent.

William and Mary, both Protestants, became king and queen regnant, respectively, following the Glorious Revolution, which resulted in the deposition of her Roman Catholic father, James II and VII.

Mary's father, James II and VII, was the last Catholic monarch in the British Isles.

Other defining recordings include " Sugar Town ", the 1967 number one " Somethin ' Stupid " ( a duet with her father ), the title song from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, several collaborations with Lee Hazlewood such as " Jackson ", and her cover of Cher's " Bang Bang ( My Baby Shot Me Down )", which features during the opening sequence of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.

His father James was a storekeeper, the son of Scottish crofters who had immigrated to Australia in the mid-1850s in the wake of the Victorian gold rush.

Kimble in this version was portrayed by actor Timothy Daly, whose father James had guest starred in two segments (" Running Scared " and " The Evil Men Do ") of the original series.

He married Berthe Sadie Delmont, known as Toots, on 12 August 1936, and her father Joseph Delmont, a wealthy Johannesburg businessman, bought a salon for James.