Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 155

acter of historical moments. Lyell ridicules the old cyclical theories of Egypt
and Greece, the ewige Wiederkehr or eternal return, but this passage might
apply just as well to Hutton's ahistorical vision:
For they compared the course of events on our globe to astronomical
cycles . . . They taught that on the earth, as well as in the heavens, the same
identical phenomena recurred again and again in a perpetual vicissitude. The
same individual men were doomed to be re-born, and to perform the same
actions as before; the same arts were to be invented, and the same cities built
and destroyed. The Argonautic expedition was destined to sail again with the
same heroes, and Achilles with his Myrmidons, to renew the combat before
the walls of Troy. (I, 156-157)
Finally, we must never lose the simple and unvarnished joy of discovering a
past that had disappeared from view: "Meanwhile the charm of first
discovery is our own, and as we explore this magnificent field of inquiry, the
sentiment of a great historian of our times [Niebuhr, author of the History of
Rome ] may continually be present to our minds, that 'he who calls what has
vanished back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating"' (I, 74).
Dating the Tertiary by Time's Stately Cycle
Since preservation improves with recency in the geological record, we might
anticipate that the youngest rocks would be most easy to resolve by the
stratigraphic research program. Old (Paleozoic) rocks are often twisted and
metamorphosed, their fossils distorted, pulverized, or entirely leached away.
Geologists did struggle with the Paleozoic, and its resolution was a triumph
and test of ultimate utility for the stratigraphic research program (see
Rudwick's brilliant account of the Devonian controversy, 1985).
Tertiary strata of the "age of mammals" (all but the tail end of the last 65
million years by modern reckoning) should have succumbed first to
resolution, as a test case for the new techniques. Paradoxically, by contingent
bad fortune of the particular history