Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 130

spected theories of physics and cosmology. In simplified essence, the earth
had formed hot (in a molten or gaseous state), as maintained by the nebular
hypothesis of Kant and Laplace, then the leading theory for the origin of our
solar system. As the physics of large bodies dictates, the earth had cooled
steadily through time. As the earth cools, it contracts. The outer crust
solidifies, but the molten interior continues to shrink and "pull away" from
the rigid surface. This contraction creates an instability that becomes more
and more severe until the rigid crust cracks and collapses upon the shrunken
core. The earth's intermittent paroxysms are these geological moments of
violent readjustment—and they explain a host of empirical phenomena,
including the linearity of mountain chains as cracks of shrinkage or breakage.
Since life adapts to environment, the harsher worlds of our cooling earth have
engendered more complex creatures better able to cope.
How did Lyell respond to this powerful theory of the earth and life? In part,
he reacted as the stated ideals of science profess—by defending his own
vision with evidence and theoretical arguments (see the next section of this
chapter). But he also counterattacked with the same successful rhetoric that
secured the cardboard history of geology—he again conflated phenomena
and procedures, arguing that the substantive claims of catastrophism are
unintelligible in principle because all scientists accept the methodological
uniformities of law and process.
Lyell begins his attack on Elie de Beaumont's physics of catastrophism in the
historical introduction to his chapter "on the causes of vicissitudes in
climate" (I, ch. 7). Lyell identifies his usual bugbear of different causes on an
ancient earth as the wrong way to understand geological changes in climate.
He designates as villain "the cosmogonist" who "has availed himself of this,
as of every obscure problem in geology, to confirm his views concerning a
period when the laws of the animate and inanimate world were wholly
distinct from those now established" (I, 104). As illustrations, Lyell chooses
the most outlandish of old and discredited ideas, especially Burnet's change
in axial tilt following Noah's flood. He then makes a quick transition from
these abandoned fancies to