Amid all the revolutions of the globe, the economy of Nature has been uniform,... and her laws are the only things that have resisted the general movement. The rivers and the rocks, the seas and the continents, have been changed in all their parts; but the laws which direct those changes, and the rules to which they are subject, have remained invariably the same.

Biographical memoir. Illustrations of the Huttonian theory of the earth (ed. 1822)