The result was yet another set of new mountainsalpine mountains which erosion brought down before the end of the Jurassic, but not enough to obliterate the story that is told in Carlin Canyon. Still gazing at the Carlin unconformity, Ken Deffeyes said, “Profound as all the time is to build and destroy those mountain ranges, it is just a one-acter in the history of the Basin and Range -small potatoes, weak beer, just a little piece of time, a little piece of the action, lost in all the welter of all the other history.” There had been two complete cycles of erosion and deposition and mountain building in this one place in one-fortieth of the time scale. That is what made John Playfair’s mind zakelijke energie grow giddy when James Hutton took him in i 788 to see the angular unconformity at Siccar Point. It was especially fortunate that Playfair was there, and that Playfair knew Hutton and Hutton’s geology equally well, for when Hutton finally wrote his book most readers were trampled by the prose. Hutton was at best a difficult writer. Insights came to him but phrases did not. James Hall, who was twenty-seven when he went with Hutton and Playfair to Siccar Point, would say of Hutton years later, “I must own that on reading Dr. Hutton’s first geological publication I was induced to reject his system entirely, and should probably have continued still to do so, with the great majority of the world, but for my habits of intimacy with the author, the vivacity and perspicuity of whose conversation formed a striking contrast to the obscurity of his writings.” Hall, incidentally, melted zakelijke energie vergelijken rock in crucibles and saw how crystals formed as it cooled. He is regarded as the founder of experimental geology. John Playfair likewise assessed Hutton’s literary style as containing “a degree of obscurity astonishing to those who knew him, and who heard him every day converse with no less clearness and precision than animation and force.”