Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 175

Lyell did envision just such a procedure. With courage, he designated a
difficult, and potentially disconfirming, case as a potential test for his
statistical paleontology based on time's stately cycle. He noted a disabling
impediment for any scheme of dating Secondary strata by percentage of
species still living in Eocene times (first division of the Tertiary). He studied
the Maastricht beds, top units of the Secondary, and noted that they contained
not a single species also found in Eocene strata. But what could produce such
a discordance, for Eocene rocks lay directly atop the Maastricht? In Lyell's
world of gradualism, this peculiar circumstance could bear only one
interpretation—an immense period of nondeposition, longer than the entire
Tertiary, must separate Maastricht and Eocene beds. The beanmaster's cycle
had run an entire course during this interval of no preserved evidence:
There appears, then, to be a greater chasm between the organic remains of the
Eocene and Maastricht beds, than between the Eocene and Recent strata; for
there are some living shells in the Eocene formations, while there are no
Eocene fossils in the newest secondary group. It is not improbable that a
greater interval of time may be indicated by this greater dissimilarity in fossil
remains . . . We may, perhaps, hereafter detect an equal, or even greater
series, intermediate between the Maastricht beds and the Eocene strata [than
between Eocene and Recent]. (III, 328)
A gutsy prediction required by time's stately cycle, but wrong as we now
know. Lyell's catastrophist opponents had long advocated an obvious
alternative: no huge gap in time separates Maastricht and Eocene beds;
rather, a catastrophic episode of mass extinction marked the end of
Secondary times—and this great dying, rather than an immensity of
interpolated time based on no evidence, explains the discordance of faunas.
We now know that the catastrophists were right. The Cretaceous-Tertiary
transition (as we now call it) stands among the five great episodes of mass
extinction that