He increased his comfo1t when he invested in a company that made sal ammoniac from collected soot of the city. He performed experiments-in chemistry, mainly. He extracted table salt from a zeolite. But for the most part-over something like fifteen years-he concentrated his daily study on the building of his theory. Growing barley on his farm in Be1wickshire, he had perceived slow destruction watching streams carry soil to the sea. It occurred to him that if streams were to do that through enough time, there would be no land on which to farm. So there must be in the world a source of new soil. It would zakelijke energie come from above-that was to say, from high terrain-and be made by rain and frost slowly reducing mountains, which in stages would be ground down from boulders to cobbles to pebbles to sand to silt to mud by a ridge-to-ocean system of dendritic streams. Rivers would carry their burden to the sea, but along the way they would set it down, as fertile plains. The Amazon had brought off the Andes half a continent of plains. Rivers, especially in flood, again and again would pick up the load, to give it up ultimately in depths of still water. There, in layers, the mud, silt, sand, and pebbles would pile up until they reached a depth where heat and pressure could cause them to become consolidated, fused, indurated, lithified-rock. The story could hardly end there. If it did, then the surface of the earth would have long since worn smooth and be some sort of global swamp. “Old continents are wearing away,” he decided, “and new continents forming in the bottom of the sea.” There were fossil marine creatures in high places. They had not got up there in a flood. Something had lifted the rock out of the sea and folded it up as mountains. One had only to ponder volcanoes and hot springs to sense that there was a great deal of heat within the zakelijke energie vergelijken earth-much exceeding what could ever be produced by an odd seam of spontaneously burning coal-and that not only could high heat soften up rock and change it into other forms of rock, it could apparently move whole regions of the crustal package and bend them and break them and elevate them far above the sea. Granite also seemed to Hutton to be a product of great heat and in no sense a precipitate that somehow grew in water. Granite was not, in a sequential sense, primitive rock. It appeared to him to have come bursting upward in a hot fluid state to lift the country above it and to squirt itself thick and thin into preexisting formations. No one had so much as imagined this before. Basalt was no precipitate, either.