ABSTRACT
In 1831, the Rev. William Whewell (1794-1866), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, coined the term “uniformitarianism” to describe the geological doctrine developed by Charles Lyell (1797-1875) the year before in the first volume of his Principles of Geology. In the Principles, Lyell presented extensive geological evidence to suggest that former changes in the earth’s surface could be explained by geological causes now in operation. Lyell saw the past history of the earth as continuous with the present. Throughout a long succession of geological changes that included great variations in climate, he believed, conditions on the earth’s surface had remained essentially similar to those existing today. There was no separation between the modern natural world and that of the geological past; they were uniform. Whewell recognized that Lyell’s viewpoint was directly opposed to that of most geologists of the time, who assumed that the elevation of sedimentary strata from the bottom of the sea to form hills and mountains, together with the extinction of successive assemblages of fossil animals, must have required “powers more energetic and extensive than those which belong to the common course of every day nature.” Most geologists, said Whewell, “spoke of a break in the continuity of nature’s operations; of the present state of things as permanent and tranquil, the past having been progressive and violent” (Whewell 1831, 190). In 1820, the Rev. William Buckland (1784-1856) at Oxford University had described geological causes still in action in the modern world as merely “the last expiring efforts of those mighty disturbing forces which once operated” (Buckland 1820, 5). To such belief in a progressive and violent geological past, a belief to which he himself adhered, Whewell gave the name “catastrophism.”
