Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 154

based on laws of nature that impart no distinctive historical character to
present phenomena. Thus, Werner had viewed geology as "a subordinate
department of mineralogy" (I, 4), and Desmarest as a branch of physical
geography. But minerals owe their properties to chemical composition,
landforms to physical agents of uplift and erosion. Neither discipline
acknowledges the irreducibly historical character of geological phenomena.
Another proposed union with cosmogony must also be rejected; for, while
geology requires a place among sciences of history, it must be defined as an
empirical study of preserved records, and not linked with mental excursions
about the origins of things.
As a direct study of history, geology owes its stunning success to a great
transformation of practice, then just a generation old—the stratigraphic
research program, using fossils as the key to ordering by age: "In recent
times, we may attribute our rapid progress chiefly to the careful
determination of the order of succession in mineral masses, by means of their
different organic contents, and their regular superposition" (I, 30).
In a forceful passage, Lyell identifies the distinctive method of history—we
need not ape the quantitative procedures of physical science, but must
celebrate the power of what others with less understanding might deem a
humdrum occupation, the ordering of events in time.
By the geometer were measured the regions of space, and the relative
distances of the heavenly bodies—by the geologist myriads of ages were
reckoned, not by arithmetical computation, but by a train of physical events—
a succession of phenomena in the animate and inanimate worlds—signs
which convey to our minds more definite ideas than figures can do, of the
immensity of time.
Physics used its techniques to expand space; we have employed ours to
enlarge time—results scarcely matched for significance in the history of
thought, but won by different methods.
Lyell recognized that real history must be a "succession of phenomena."
Precise cyclical recurrence would blot the distinctive char-