Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 159

Lyell's world view did not permit him to work by the usual methods of his
profession. Life participated fully in the dynamic steady state of time's cycle.
The fossil record displayed no vector of progress, and its sequence of species
could not be ordered by any criterion of advance. To put it as baldly as
possible, life (as a totality) was always just about the same—with balance
maintained both in number of species and relative proportions of different
groups. How, then, could a Lyellian find any paleontological criterion for
dating rocks—and, if not, how could he participate in the central and guiding
concern of his profession?
Had Lyell been a strict Huttonian, he would have found no exit from this
dilemma. He would have been mired in an ahistorical outlook that viewed
each event as so similar to its corresponding stage in the previous cycle that
no criterion of history could be established. But Lyell, as a premier practicing
geologist of his day, was a committed historian. He accepted the uniqueness
of events, and used this principle to extract a mark of history from time's
cycle.
To borrow Lyell's own favored technique of metaphorical illustration, we
may depict all the earth's species at any one time as a fixed number of beans
in a bag—for species are particles in Lyell's vision. We begin a five-day
experiment. The bag contains a thousand beans, and it will always hold this
number. New beans are entering at a fixed and constant schedule, say one
every two minutes. But the bag can only hold a thousand beans, so each time
a new one enters, the beanmaster reaches in and pulls an old one out at
random.
One more crucial step completes the isomorphism with Lyell's view of life.
The beans are not identical; each is a distinct historical object. Let us say that
each bears a unique brand in its lower right-hand corner (if beans may be
construed as possessing such a thing). We can tell unambiguously which
bean is which—but, and here's the rub, these distinct brands include
absolutely no signature of time whatever . The beans are not color-coded by
day of entry into the bag, or marked with the geometry of their time of origin.
In other words, we can recognize each bean as an distinctive object, but we