Water was favored as the formative element in Neptunist systems (such as Maillet's proposed system, which postulated that the level of the sea had fallen and that the face of the Earth had been shaped by part of the circulating waters), while the action of fire was favored by the later
Plutonists (who started from the theory of the internal fire advanced by Descartes, and whose ideas solidified in Hutton's theory of the Earth), and this was debated until the nineteenth century.