spects the reverse of Black. He was a dweller
out of doors, a man of strong vitality and high spirits, careless of
dress and appearance, setting little store by the world's prejudices
or fashions, and speaking the broadest Scotch, but overflowing with
views and speculations and fun, and with a certain originality of
expression, often very piquant. Every face brightened, says Playfair,
when Hutton entered a room. He had been bred a doctor, though he never
practised, but, devoting himself to agriculture, had been for years
one of the leading improvers of the Border counties, and is said,
indeed, to have been the first man in Scotland to plough with a pair
of horses and no driver, the old eight-ox plough being then in
universal use. Between his early chemical studies and his later
agricultural pursuits, his curiosity was deeply aroused as he walked
about the fields and dales, not merely concerning the composition but
the origin of the soils and rocks and minerals that lay in the crust
of the globe, and he never ceased examining and speculating till he
completed his theory of the earth which became a new starting-point
for all subsequent geological research. He was a bold investigator,
and Playfair distinguishes him finely in this respect from Black by
remarking that "Dr. Black hated nothing so much as error, and Dr.
Hutton nothing so much as ignorance. The one was always afraid of
going beyond the truth, and the other of not reaching it." He went
little into general society, but Playfair says that in the more
private circles which he preferred he was the most delightful of
companions.

The conversation of the club was often, as was to be expected from its
composition, scientific, but Professor Playfair says it was always
free, and never didactic or disputatious, and that "as the club was
much the resort of the strangers who visited Edinburgh from any
objects connected with art or with science, it derived from them an
extraordinary degree of vivacity and interest."[294]

Its name was the Oyster Club, and it may be thought from that
circumstance that those great philosophers did not spurn the delights
of more ordinary mortals. But probably no three men could be found who
cared less for the pleasures of the table. Hutton was an abstainer;
Black a vegetarian, his usual fare being "some bread, a few prunes,
and a measured quantity of milk diluted with water"; and as for Smith,
his only weakness seems to have been for lump sug