James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: A Machine without a History - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 94

a shorter volume describing the Huttonian theory in clearer form. We know
Hutton almost exclusively from Playfair's beautiful and successful
exposition, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802).
Tradition also dictates that Playfair simply translated his friend's ideas
without alteration—so that, in the Illustrations, we really do read pure Hutton
spruced up. In one sense, I do not deny this claim. The essence of Mutton's
system receives an accurate and sensitive description in Playfair's writing.
Time's cycle, in particular, appears in unvarnished form, with appropriate
Newtonian analogies and incisive comparisons. I particularly treasure
Playfair's contrast of Buffon's historical earth, declining to destruction by loss
of heat, with Mutton's timeless cycles. Note Playfair's equation of time's
cycle with rationality itself:
Buffon represents the cooling of our planet, and its loss of heat, as a process
continually advancing, and which has no limit, but the final extinction of life
and motion over all the surface, and through all the interior, of the earth. The
death of nature herself is the distant but gloomy object that terminates our
view, and reminds us of the wild fictions of the Scandinavian mythology,
according to which, annihilation is at last to extend its empire even to the
gods. This dismal and unphilosophic vision was unworthy of the genius of
Buffon, and wonderfully ill suited to the elegance and extent of his
understanding. It forms a complete contrast to the theory of Dr Hutton, where
nothing is to be seen beyond the continuation of the present order; where no
latent seed of evil threatens final destruction to the whole; and where the
movements are so perfect, that they can never terminate of themselves. This
is surely a view of the world more suited to the dignity of Nature and the
wisdom of its Author. (485-486)
Yet, in another sense, I find a universe of difference between Hutton and
Playfair—a distinction that has been missed because Hutton has not been
understood as a theorist of time's cycle who denied history. These are the
parts of Hutton's work that seem most unacceptable and archaic in the light
of geology's later tradi-