Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 166

him as an old fuddy-duddy castigating evolution even before Darwin tried to
make the idea popular.
Chapters 1-4 of volume II, Lyell's attack on Lamarck and the entire concept
of evolution, argue that species are particles, not tendencies or arbitrary
segments of a continuous flux. Species are beans in nature's bag. In the
closing words of chapter 4: "It appears that species have a real existence in
nature, and that each was endowed, at the time of its creation, with the
attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished" (II, 65).
Chapters 5-8, on geographic distribution, claim that species arise at
particular places, in foci of origin. Again, they are not general tendencies, but
particular things-beans that enter the bag as unique items at definable
moments. Lyell writes that "single stocks only of each animal and plant are
originally created, and that individuals of new species do not suddenly start
up in many different places at once" (II, 80).
Chapters 9-10 then discuss the principle of perfect fit to prevailing
environment, the branding of each bean with its distinctive 8 signature: "the
fluctuations of the animate and inanimate creation should be in perfect
harmony with each other" (II, 159). Finally, chapter 11 argues that
introduction of new species compensates for gradual loss of old forms-the
beanbag remains in dynamic balance, always full but changing in
composition: "the hypothesis of the gradual extinction of certain animals and
plants and the successive introduction of new species" (III, 30).
Volume III is an excursion through geological time—an application of
Lyell's methodology to the earth's actual history. But
8. Lest this claim seem inconsistent with Lyell's reverie about returning
ichthyosaurs, I note that he chose his words with consummate care. The famous
passage, caricatured by De la Beche, states: "then might those genera of animals
return," not "then might those species . . ." The difference is crucial, not trivial.
Genera, to Lyell, are arbitrary names for anatomical designs; species are unique
particulars. The returning summer of the great year might inspire the origin of a
creature sufficiently like Jurassic ichthyosaurs that taxonomists would place it in the
same genus. But the returning ichthyosaur would be a new bean, with distinctive
characters marking it as a unique species.