Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 149

life's diversity. Their sequential origins display no vector of progress for a
positive reason of theory, not a mere claim of observation (see previous
section): Lyell espoused perfect adaptation between species and their
environments; each species is a mirror of its surroundings. Therefore, any
true direction in life's history can only record a corresponding arrow in the
physical world. Since the physical world has remained in steady state
(volume I), life has also maintained an unchanging complexity and diversity.
Species turn over constantly; none alive today graced the Carboniferous coal
swamps. But anatomical designs do not accrete or improve.
Volume III, in twenty-six chapters, presents a descriptive account of the
earth's actual history, ordered, as a man committed to modern processes
might, in a sequence opposite to modern conventions— starting with most
recent times (where the work of modern processes can be assessed most
readily) and working back to the oldest rocks. Many readers have dismissed
volume III as dull and outdated description, but it embodies the central
defense of Lyell's game plan. It presents his most important argument for
time's stately cycle—for a vision in science is only as good as its application
and its utility. Volume III, read as the ultimate test of time's cycle, embodies
two major purposes. First, the striking vectors of geological history read
literally must be interpreted, by Lyell's method of probing behind
appearance, as the way that an imperfect record would render time's cycle in
preserved evidence. Again and again, we learn (for example) how apparent
mass extinctions are periods of nondeposition, and how greater contortion of
older rocks records the longer time available for their subsequent
modification by constant forces of metamorphism, not the greater vigor of a
pristine earth.
Second, Lyell, as a great scientist, understood the cardinal principle of our
profession—that utility in action is the ultimate test of an idea's value. Most
of his earlier defenses of time's cycle had been rhetorical, verbal, or negative
(by showing that directional appearances of the literal record do not disprove
a steady state). To crown the success of his brief, Lyell now needed an
achievement of sub-