Hutton & Stenson - Founding Fathers of Geology and Leiden University
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Document GLIAG-ESS-2026-036-LDN · Historical Essay · English edition · 25 August 2026
GLIAG HISTORICAL ESSAY
From Niels Stensen to James Hutton — and from Florence back to the Lokhorstkerk
Drs. M.P.T. Chin-A-Lien, MBA, M.Sc., Ing. GeologistPrincipal Founding Partner · Managing Partner · Chief Architect, GLIAG N.V.
Certified Professional Geologist (AAPG) Nr. 5201-1996
Chartered European Geologist (EFG) Nr. 92-1996
Energy Negotiator (AIEN), June 2021
When we look at a gallery of the “Fathers of Geology,” we usually see an international procession: Scotland, Denmark, France, England, Germany, Finland and the United States. Their portraits appear to distribute the history of Earth science neatly across nations and disciplines. Yet behind the first two names—Niels Stensen, better known as Nicolaus Steno, and James Hutton—lies a remarkable shared origin that is easily overlooked.
Both came from abroad. Both began as physicians. Both learned to read nature through exceptionally precise observation. And both received their medical doctorates from Leiden University.
This is not a minor historical footnote. Of the twenty founders shown in the widely circulated “Fathers of Geology” chart, the first two were academically formed and awarded their doctorates in Leiden. Long before geology existed as an independent university discipline, Leiden had already contributed to its intellectual birth.
Leiden University, founded in 1575, gained an international reputation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a place where scholarship did not rest solely upon inherited authority. Anatomy, medicine, natural philosophy and empirical observation came together. Foreign students were drawn by the university’s reputation, the comparative intellectual freedom of the Dutch Republic and the presence of scholars who sought to understand the body and nature by observing, comparing and testing again.
That scientific climate is the connecting thread between Stensen and Hutton. They earned doctorates in medicine, not geology—the modern academic discipline did not yet exist. But they transferred medicine’s habit of inferring sequence, cause and process from visible structures to the study of the Earth.
Leiden did not give them a chair in geology. Leiden helped them develop a method.
The relationship of Stensen and Hutton with Leiden is preserved not only in university registers, dissertations and later publications. It is now literally anchored in the walls of the city. At two addresses, the Leidse Geologische Vereniging—Leiden Geological Society, or LGV—installed commemorative plaques: one on the Rapenburg and another on the Langebrug.
Stensen lived from 1660 to 1661 on the site of present-day Rapenburg 84. The monumental canal house is now known as Huize Mal Y Pense, a student house belonging to L.S.V. Minerva. Its present use adds a distinctly Leiden layer to the story. Where a young Danish researcher formed his scientific outlook in the seventeenth century, generations of students now live at the centre of the university city’s academic and social life.
On 8 February 2025, the Danish Chargé d’Affaires unveiled the Stensen plaque on this façade. The ceremony opened a historical route through Leiden: from Rapenburg 84, the company proceeded to the Stensen exhibition in the Old University Library at Rapenburg 70 and then to the symposium in the Lokhorstkerk. Residence, university archive and scientific thought were thus reconnected in a single day.
The plaque does more than record that Stensen lived there. It turns the house into a place of intellectual memory. Every student passing through its door lives—knowingly or unknowingly—where one of geology’s founders once looked out across the same Leiden canal.
James Hutton, too, was given a permanent address in Leiden’s historical streetscape. Archival research by LGV member Bert Schuchmann established that Hutton stayed in 1749 with the widow Van der Tas at the location corresponding to present-day Langebrug 101. The correct street name is therefore Langebrug, not Langestraat. The original house no longer survives, but its location has been reconstructed with sufficient precision from historical records.
During the LGV’s eighteenth lustrum on 22 April 2023, a procession of forty to fifty members, preceded by the special LGV banner and the Red Rose of Lochbuie Pipes and Drums, marched from the Van der Werffpark to Langebrug 101. There, Peter Westbroek spoke about Hutton’s importance to modern geology before unveiling the plaque installed by the LGV. A QR code on the plaque connects the physical façade with digital information about Hutton’s life and work.
It was an exceptionally fitting ceremony. The Scotsman who taught the world to understand “deep time” was commemorated in Leiden with music from his homeland, a scientific address and a stone marker on the façade of his former residence. For a moment, the city itself became a geological exposure: behind the modern frontage, an eighteenth-century academic layer was made visible.
Together, Rapenburg 84 and Langebrug 101 form a small Leiden walking route through the prehistory of geology. One house recalls the man who taught us how strata succeed one another; the other commemorates the man who understood how much time that succession represents. The plaques reveal what would otherwise remain hidden beneath the surface of the city.
The Dane Niels Stensen enrolled at Leiden in 1660. He entered an exceptional medical and intellectual environment that included Franciscus Sylvius, Jan Swammerdam, Reinier de Graaf and Frederik Ruysch. In Amsterdam he had already identified the excretory duct of the parotid gland—still known as the Stensen or Stenonian duct—and in Leiden he developed into a researcher unwilling to accept any assertion before examining the structure itself.
In 1664, Leiden University awarded him his doctorate in medicine in absentia cum laude. According to Leiden University, this was unique in the university’s history. The precise formulation is therefore justified: Stensen not only studied in Leiden; he actually received his doctorate there.
His subsequent journey to Italy shifted his attention from the human body to fossils, sediments and landscapes. In Florence, at the court of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and within the intellectual world of the Accademia del Cimento, he examined shark heads and the so-called glossopetrae. He realised that these “tongue stones” were not arbitrary mineral forms but fossilised shark teeth—the remains of once-living organisms enclosed within subsequently formed rock.
In his 1669 De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus, Stensen formulated principles that still stand at the beginning of almost every education in stratigraphy: superposition, original horizontality and lateral continuity. In principle, a younger bed lies above an older one; sediments are originally deposited more or less horizontally; and layers extend laterally until they thin out or meet a boundary.
Stensen thereby gave geology its first grammar. Rocks were no longer merely objects; they became sentences in a history.
The LGV brought this historical connection back to life. On 5 December 2024, with considerable ceremony in Florence, the Society received the Medal of Honour of Blessed Niccolò Stenone. The location carried profound meaning. Florence was the city in which Stensen turned his anatomical precision towards the Earth and where his geological thinking matured.
The medal was more than an honour bestowed upon an association. It recognised an intellectual line connecting Denmark, Leiden and Florence: birth, academic formation and scientific breakthrough.
On Saturday 8 February 2025, the LGV continued the commemoration with the Niels Stensen Symposium in Leiden’s historic Lokhorstkerk on Pieterskerkstraat. The year marked 365 years since Stensen had enrolled as a student in Leiden. Lectures and historical reflections brought together his extraordinary range: anatomist, physician, early palaeontological thinker, stratigrapher, philosopher, cleric and tireless seeker of truth.
The Lokhorstkerk was an almost symbolic setting. In the heart of the old university city, the history of science, geology and philosophy of life were not separated but placed beside one another again—just as Stensen himself placed the visible, the knowable and the still unknown side by side.
His famous thought captures that attitude:
Beautiful is what we see; more beautiful is what we understand; by far the most beautiful is what we do not yet understand.
Almost ninety years after Stensen’s doctorate, a young Scotsman arrived in Leiden. James Hutton had studied medicine, anatomy and chemistry in Edinburgh and Paris. He enrolled in Leiden on 14 August 1749, lived on the Langebrug and, after a remarkably brief but well-documented stay, received his doctorate in medicine on 12 September 1749.
His dissertation, De sanguine et circulatione microcosmi, concerned blood and circulation within the microcosm of the human body. Hutton would later direct the same process-oriented vision towards the macrocosm of the Earth: circulation, breakdown, transport, deposition, consolidation, uplift and renewed erosion.
Hutton did not become a practising physician. Through chemistry and agriculture, he came ever closer to the landscape and the subsurface. In exposures such as Siccar Point, he recognised not a single act of creation but successive cycles of deposition, tilting, erosion and renewed sedimentation. The Earth had to possess a history vastly longer than human chronology could encompass.
From this insight grew his Theory of the Earth and the principle that present processes provide the key to understanding the past. Hutton saw the Earth as a dynamic system and thereby opened the intellectual space for “deep time.” His celebrated formulation—“no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”—made time itself a geological dimension.
Stensen had shown how strata should be read. Hutton revealed how much time those strata contained.
The year 2026 marks three hundred years since James Hutton’s birth in Edinburgh. His birth was recorded as 3 June 1726 under the Old Style calendar, corresponding to 14 June in the later Gregorian reckoning used for the tercentenary commemoration. Across the world, the anniversary has prompted renewed reflection on his importance to geology, soils, landscapes and the concept of a living, continuously changing Earth.
The Leidse Geologische Vereniging celebrated Hutton’s tercentenary on Sunday 14 June 2026 in Leiden. In doing so, it symbolically returned the founder of modern geology to the city where he had received his academic title in 1749. The celebration built upon years of LGV historical research into his brief residence, his doctorate and the question of how Leiden’s academic ethos might have influenced his later thinking.
That final question must be treated with scholarly restraint. No simple document exists in which Hutton declares that Leiden produced his Theory of the Earth. His geological theory emerged much later from agricultural practice, chemical knowledge, travel, debate within the Scottish Enlightenment and, above all, field observation. Yet the intellectual affinity is unmistakable: the body and the Earth understood as circulating systems; visible structure providing access to invisible process; observation placed above inherited authority.
Leiden was not the endpoint of Hutton’s development. It was an early station in the formation of his way of thinking.
The image presenting twenty “Fathers of Geology” is, of course, not a definitive canon. It omits important women, scientific traditions and many other contributors, while several of its labels simplify complex histories. Nevertheless, it contains a wonderful Leiden irony: its first two pioneers—the founder of stratigraphy and the founder of modern geology—both became doctors of Leiden.
Niels Stensen · doctor 1664
James Hutton · doctor 1749
Eighty-five years separate their doctorates. A scientific bridge joins their ideas. Stensen taught us to determine the order of strata; Hutton taught us to understand the immeasurable time behind that order. One gave the Earth a method of reading; the other gave it temporal depth.
Leiden is rightly renowned as a city of universities, museums, discoveries and academic freedom. But its significance lies not only in buildings, archives or famous names. It also resides in its ability to keep scientific memory alive.
Through the Stensen medal in Florence, the plaque at Rapenburg 84, the symposium in the Lokhorstkerk, the Hutton plaque at Langebrug 101 and the 2026 tercentenary celebration, the Leidse Geologische Vereniging has done something valuable. It has shown that science is not a sequence of isolated discoveries, but a long conversation between generations, cities and landscapes.
From Copenhagen to Leiden and Florence.
From Edinburgh and Paris to Leiden and Siccar Point.
From anatomy to stratigraphy.
From blood circulation to cycles of rock.
From what is visible to what can be understood only through careful thought.
The history of geology has many fathers, mothers, critics and successors. But Leiden may state with quiet pride that two of its earliest and most influential founders received their doctorates here.
Perhaps that is the most beautiful meaning of these commemorations. The old university city does not merely look back upon two great names. It reminds us anew of their shared method: observe carefully; question the seemingly self-evident; read form as history; and remain humble before the immensity of what we do not yet understand.
Editorial note: The treatment of the Stensen Symposium summarises its historical and scientific themes from the official LGV commemoration material and Stensen’s documented life and work. A programme-by-programme account will be added once the author’s photographs and captions have been supplied.
This essay is published for historical, educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment, financial, legal, tax, technical or professional advice of any kind, and it must not be relied upon as a basis for any decision. Readers should obtain independent professional advice appropriate to their own circumstances.
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This essay was prepared independently by Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group N.V. It was not commissioned, sponsored, reviewed or approved by any government, university, learned society, operator, national oil company or commercial party. References to Leiden University, the Leidse Geologische Vereniging, the Edinburgh Geological Society and other institutions are historical and bibliographic only and imply no endorsement or affiliation. All interpretations, emphases and any errors remain those of the author.
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GLIAG-ESS-2026-036-LDN · 25 August 2026 · English edition
Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group N.V. · Zoetermeer / Delft · Paramaribo · petroleumenergyinsights.com
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