Principles of Geology

Charles Lyell's three-volume Principles of Geology (1830–1833) consolidated Huttonian uniformitarianism as the dominant nineteenth-century geological framework. Lyell's exhaustive marshalling of evidence — for the slow operation of geological processes, for the antiquity of the Earth, against catastrophist readings of the stratigraphic record — produced the geological consensus against which the biblical Flood as a historical event becomes problematic. The work was a principal influence on Darwin's Origin of Species and the principal scientific source against which subsequent diluvialist and catastrophist arguments have been positioned.