A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Between Hutton’s day and Lyell’s there arose a new geological controversy, which largely superseded, but is often confused with, the old Neptunian-Plutonian dispute. The new battle became an argument between catastrophism and uniformitarianism—unattractive terms for an important and very long-running dispute. Catastrophists, as you might expect from the name, believed that the Earth was shaped by abrupt cataclysmic events—floods, principally, which is why catastrophism and Neptunism are often wrongly bundled together. Catastrophism was particularly comforting to clerics like Buckland because it allowed them to incorporate the biblical flood of Noah into serious scientific discussions. Uniformitarians, by contrast, believed that changes on Earth were gradual and that nearly all earth processes happened slowly, over immense spans of time. Hutton was much more the father of the notion than Lyell, but it was Lyell most people read, and so he became in most people’s minds, then and now, the father of modern geological thought.