Amazing stuff is it not? Such a shame that his work was twisted in such a way as to be very nearly unrecognizable from the original. One of these days I’ll have to look into Lyell’s story to determine what drove him to create the uniformitarian myth.
Darwin wrote in his journals what he saw - but when he finally put pen to paper, out of deference to his hero Lyell, he left out anything that conflicted with the uniformitarian theory. Besides, Darwin needed the Lyell timeframes for his own evolutioniary theory.
That’s all very understandable given the times they lived in - maybe- but neither hold water now. It’s the gospel of Darwin and Lyell that is still being taught I think.
The science is never settled, and anyone who tries to tell you that it is should go and stand in the corner with Al Gore.
Charles Lyell found his evidence when studying Mt. Etna in Italy. He returned to London in 1829 and wrote his most famous work Principles of Geology. The book included a large amount of data and very detailed explanations. He did not finish revisions on the book until 1833 after several more trips to get more data.
Perhaps the most important idea to come out of Principles of Geology is Uniformitarianism. This theory states that all the natural laws of the universe that are in existence now existed at the beginning of time. This was an idea that Lyell had first gotten from works by James Hutton. It was seen as the opposite of Georges Cuvier’s catastrophism.
http://evolution.about.com/od/scientists/p/Charles-Lyell.htm