Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 152

know (or care) where we are in a series that displays no vestige of a
beginning, no prospect of an end. (I also noted that John Playfair, Mutton's
Boswell, did not follow Hutton's idiosyncrasy, but used the ordinary
language of historical narrative in his explication of Hutton's theories.
Therefore, since most scientists know Hutton only through Playfair, this
special character of Hutton's system has been lost.)
Lyell shared Hutton's commitment to time's cycle, but not his ahistorical
vision, for reasons both personal and chronological. The fifty years
separating Hutton and Lyell had witnessed a transformation in practice
among British geologists. Hutton crowned a tradition of general system-
building, or "theories of the earth." The next generation had abjured this
procedure as premature and harmful speculation. The nascent science of
geology needed hard data from the field, not fatuous, overarching theories.
The eschewing of "interpretation," and restriction of discussion to facts
alone, was (however impossible the ideal), actually written into the
procedures of the Geological Society of London, founded in 1807. As a
primary approach to field evidence, embraced for its plethora of exciting
results, the Geological Society adopted the stratigraphic research program.
The primary task of geology must be defined as unraveling the sequence of
actual events in time, using the key to history that had just been developed to
the point of general utility by Cuvier and William Smith—the distinctively
changing suite of fossils through time.
Lyell was a willing child of this transformation in procedure. He was a
historian, and the primary data of history are descriptions of sequential
events, each viewed as unique (lest any lack of distinction blur utility as
indicator of a particular moment). Lyell could scarcely embrace Hutton's
antihistorical viewpoint. But how could a committed historian defend and use
time's cycle? And how could non-directionalism aid the stratigraphic
research program as a tool for unraveling historical sequences?
The very first line of Lyell's Principles stakes out his difference from
Hutton's ahistorical vision: "Geology is the science which