Special Sub-Topic: Important People Of Geology Authored by: geology_rocks Sub-topic of: Earth Science

This man is came up with three important principles of geology. Principle of superposition, original horizontality and lateral continuity.

Nicholas Steno. Steno stated his three basic principles in 1669 and they are still used today.

The culmination of his efforts resulted in the first geologic map of high quality.

William Smith. Smith was a surveyor from England and started his map just before 1800. He made his correlations mainly to index fossils and completed his map in 1815.

In 1787 he published a general theory of the origin of the Earth's crust. He believed in Neptunism.

Abraham Werner. Werner did not believe in catastrophism and thought the earth was much older than humanity and did not bother correlating stratigraphic history with scripture.

He greatly criticized catastrophism and his theory's name is Plutonism.

James Hutton. Despite Hutton's revolution in geology, most people still endorsed neptunism in the early 1800's. Some of Hutton's downfall was that he was a poor writer and received bad reviews because of his anticatastrophist preachings.

He wrote 'Principles of Geology' and illustrated the concept of uniformity of natural processes through time.

Charles Lyell. Lyell's views on uniformitarianism and gradualism had a great influence on a younger friend of his. His friend was a young Charles Darwin.