Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 150

stance—something major and practical that time's stately cycle could do to
unravel the earth's history. Volume III is therefore, above all, a long
illustration of a new method, striking in its originality and brilliant in its
difference from conventional paleontology, for dating rocks of the Cenozoic
Era (the last 65 million years, since the extinction of dinosaurs) by
percentages of molluscan species still living. I shall show in the next section
that this novel method flows directly from Lyell's unusual view of time's
cycle applied to life's history.
Although (obviously, from early sections of this chapter) Lyell is not my
foremost intellectual hero, I can only describe my reading of the first edition
of the Principles as a thrill, a privilege, and an adventure. As I grasped its
brilliant coherence about the vision of time's stately cycle, shivers coursed up
and down my spine. Yet that thrill has been foreclosed to most readers. The
first edition is difficult to obtain, and many reasons conspire to degrade its
coherence through the subsequent editions that most geologists read. For one
thing, Lyell extracted almost all of volume III, and placed his discussion of
the earth's actual history into another book, the Elements of Geology (in later
editions, the Manual of Elementary Geology ]—thus divorcing his primary
application from his verbal defense of time's cycle. For another, Lyell
strongly muted his commitment to time's cycle when, late in his career, and
with both great personal struggle and splendid honesty (see pages 167-173),
he finally admitted the progressive character of life's history. Finally, he
shifted and tinkered with so many chapters that the original coherence of
argument dissipated, and the last editions almost became, after all, a textbook.
Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle
Lyell's Explication of History
Hutton and Lyell are indissolubly linked in textbook histories as the two
heroes of modern geology—Hutton as unheeded prophet,