Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 167

nineteen of its twenty-six chapters chronicle the Tertiary and most others
discuss Tertiary problems prominently. The volume ends with a sixty-page
appendix, reproducing in toto Deshayes's charts for the duration of Tertiary
mollusks and the percentage of living species in each stratigraphic unit. We
have no trouble detecting Lyell's main interest; for this is no impartial text,
allotting space in proportion to time or preserved strata.
Most working geologists could tell you that Lyell named the epochs of the
Tertiary. They know this as a curious little fact, proving that the apostle of
uniformitarianism also did some field- work. If we could only learn to grasp
the intimate—indeed necessary—connection of this achievement with his
vision of time's cycle, then we would understand the power of Lyell's system.
Lyell broke through the sterility of Hutton's ahistorical view, and showed that
the vision of time's stately cycle could serve as a research tool for geology's
basic activity, the ordering of events in time. Lyell's system works because
we inhabit a world of history—by the primal criterion of uniqueness, based
on temporal context, for each phenomenon. Charles Lyell was the historian
of time's cycle.
The Partial Unraveling of Lyell's World View
Retreating from the Uniformity of State,
or Why Lyell Became an Evolutionist
Mountains arise and erode through time—"the seas go in and the seas go
out," as the old geologists' motto proclaims. Uniformity of state might well
describe physical history. But Lyell's extension of time's cycle to the history
of life had always seemed implausible to most colleagues—especially in the
light of human origins at the very summit of time's mountain. Lyell had
provided a rationale for nonprogressionism in life's history (see pages 137-
142), but his arguments were shaky on both theoretical and empirical
grounds. Thus, when Lyell, late in his career, finally surrendered his
uncompromising commitment to time's cycle, he capitulated by admitting,