Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 118

At that stage of juvenility, I rarely challenged professorial pronouncements,
but this argument seemed wrong. I could grasp the part about nature's laws,
but constancy in accumulation of a travertine mound in southwest Ohio was a
thing, not a principle. Why shouldn't the travertine have built twice as fast ten
thousand years ago, or not at all for long stretches between periods of
deposition? I turned to Lyell and to the classical sources on
uniformitarianism.
Lyell, of course, never made such a crude confusion between principles and
particulars, but I soon discovered that he had gathered a motley set of claims
under the common umbrella of uniformity—in particular, he had made, in far
more subtle form, the very same conflation of methodological principles with
substantive claims that had fueled my professor's error about the travertine
mound. I published my very first paper (Gould, 1965) on the multiple
meanings of uniformitarianism and on the confusion that pervaded the
geological literature, as debaters spoke past each other, one side invoking a
meaning of uniformity to support a claim, while the other side tore it down
with a different definition.
All lives contain moments of pride, and many more times better forgotten. It
shall always be one of my greatest satisfactions that, as a teeny neophyte
scholar alone in a little Ohio college, I noted this central confusion at the
same time as a major revisionist movement to reassess Lyell's cardboard
history was brewing among professional historians. Many have contributed
to this revision, though I must single out the works of Hooykaas (1963),
Rudwick (1972), and Porter (1976). (My own work is a belated and insig-
nificant ripple in this tide—especially since I missed entirely the historical
purpose and meaning of what Lyell had done.) Unfortunately, the message
has not seeped through to practicing geologists, and textbook cardboard
continues unabated.
All revisionists agree on a central point: Lyell united under the common
rubric of uniformity two different kinds of claims—a set of methodological
statements about proper scientific procedure, and a group of substantive
beliefs about how the world really works. The methodological principles
were universally acclaimed by sci-