Lyellan Geology

Did Charles Lyell find his uniformitarian views about the sedimentary formations of the earth's crust in actually data, or did he superimpose his beliefs on the data? One thing is for sure, he impacted Western geologists (and maybe the entire world) for at least 100 years because they used his gradualistic worldview about the earth as law. His uniformitarian notions are now being seriously abandoned in favor of some form of neocatastrophism. The evidence is more and more displaying the presence of an rare event in the past that may very well explain the presence of the earth's rocks and fossils.