Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 109

prevails as to moral phenomena, and many of these are ascribed to the
intervention of demons, ghosts, witches, and other immaterial and
supernatural agents. By degrees, many of the enigmas of the moral and
physical world are explained, and, instead of being due to extrinsic and
irregular causes, they are found to depend on fixed and invariable laws. The
philosopher at last becomes convinced of the undeviating uniformity of
secondary causes. (I, 75-76)
Lyell then illustrates this equation of uniformity with righteousness not by
actual examples but with metaphors based on ingenious thought experiments
constructed to parallel real events by analogy. He invokes former belief in a
young earth, correctly noting that uniformity cannot be supported by those
committed to cramming our history into a few thousand years. Suppose, he
argues, that an expedition led by a hypothetical Champollion discovered the
monuments of ancient Egypt when Europeans thought that humans had first
reached the Nile at the beginning of the nineteenth century. What would they
make of the pyramids, obelisks, and ruined temples? These monuments
"would fill them with such astonishment, that for a time they would be as
men spellbound—wholly incapacitated to reason with sobriety. They might
incline at first to refer the construction of such stupendous works to some
superhuman powers of a primeval world" (I, 77).
But suppose the expedition then found "some vast repository of mummies"
apparently indicating that humans had lived long ago to build these
monuments. Honest observers (incipient uniformitarians) would then revise
their fancies and admit that ordinary men had built the pyramids, but those
committed to the old ways would have to invent even more outlandish
theories to harmonize the mummies with their persistent conviction that no
men had then inhabited Egypt. Lyell offers some suggestions: "As the banks
of the Nile have been so recently colonized, the curious substances called
mummies could never in reality have belonged to men. They may have been
generated by some plastic virtue residing in the