Methodologically, all leading catastrophists adopted a distinctive attitude towards the geological record. They preached a radical empirical literalism: interpret what you see as a true and accurate record of actual events, and interpolate nothing»[5].

Gould affirms: «How ironic, then, that modern textbook cardboard should misidentify Lyell as an empiricist who, by laborious fieldwork and close attention to objective information, drove the dogmatists of catastrophism out of science. To the contrary, the catastrophists were the empirical literalists of their time! Lyell and Darwin opposed to the catastrophism by probing “behind appearance” to interpret, rather than simply record, the data of geology.

The famous onion-coat theory, for which Werner is now chiefly remembered, was an attempt to tell the exact order in which the various kinds of rocks were formed in the first place. He held that all of the materials now composing our earth's surface were originally held in an aqueous solution, being held dissolved in the ocean water. One by one these various substances were thrown down as precipitates, the exact order being: first the granites and associated greenstones; next hornblende schists and porphyries; then slates and graywackes, "followed in turn by limestone, coal, basalt, and ores; by sand, clay, soapstone and finally by volcanic ash, some lavas, and jasper." ("The Development of the Sciences," edited by W.W. Woodruff, p.207; Yale University Press, 1923.) And as these were all deposited from the univeral ocean as chemical precipitates, they must originally have been found occurring in a true historical sequence one above the other, each kind being in the first place all around the earth, like the coat of an onion. Hence the nickname of the "onion-coat" theory.