The first uniformitarian was probably James Hutton, who observed in the late 1700s that the passing of centuries had worked only small changes to a Roman wall in England, whereas much larger changes had broken rocks into pebbles and sand. By ignoring the constraints of scriptures and considering the possibility of an old world, Hutton found that he could explain geology as the product of processes still acting, without recourse to the supernatural or the catastrophic.

Hutton's uniformitarian ideas were rescued from his poor writing and distributed widely by Charles Lyell during the mid-1800s. However, perhaps overreacting to the persistence of Biblical literalists, Lyell took uniformitarianism to an extreme, arguing not only that modern processes acted in the past to shape the Earth, but that those processes have always occurred at similar rates.

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