<P> The earlier conceptions likely had little influence on 18th - century European geological explanations for the formation of Earth . Abraham Gottlob Werner ( 1749 -- 1817 ) proposed Neptunism , where strata represented deposits from shrinking seas precipitated onto primordial rocks such as granite . In 1785 James Hutton proposed an opposing , self - maintaining infinite cycle based on natural history and not on the Biblical account . </P>
who is responsible for introducing the principle of uniformitarianism
James Hutton