Up until the publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology in 1830,[1] geologists held that the earth had been convulsed, in the not-too-distant past, by immense forces, orders of magnitude greater than those acting today. The upheavals had caused the sea to transgress over land and vice versa not once but several times. Early geologists, in a word, were catastrophists. They held that the earth’s violent motions had produced prodigious quantities of heat; that thousands of cubic miles of water had evaporated from the oceans and re-precipitated, after cooling, into torrential rains that had washed millions of tons of soil into the sea; that the earth’s rotational axis had repeatedly tilted, on occasions causing the poles to change place with one another, etc. What such early geologists could not do was to assign a reasonable cause for their catastrophes: no force originating from within the earth could possibly cause its upturning.[2]