A French contemporary of Hutton's, Georges-Louis Leclerc, had the idea the temperature of the Earth might tell us its age.

This is known as Buffon's needle problem, after the French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte DE Buffon, who first proposed it in 1733.

French contemporary of Hutton's, Georges-Louis Leclerc, had the idea the temperature of the Earth might tell us its age.