This book chronicles how successive generations of natural philosophers, geologists and geomorphologists have come to invent the view of the Earth over the past 250 years. Chronicles how successive generations of natural philosophers, geologists and geomorphologists have come to invent different views of the Earth over the last 250 years. Uses as its central viewpoint changing ideas about the significance of the action of rain and rivers on the Earth’s surface. Shows how our contemporary “truths” have come to be accepted and exposes the frailty of even the most impeccably scientific visions of the Earth.