The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 4

recognized discipline during these crucial decades, we cannot at- tribute this
cardinal event of intellectual history to an examination of rocks by one
limited fraternity of earth scientists. Indeed, Rossi (1984) has argued
persuasively that the discovery of deep time combined the insights of those
we would now call theologians, archaeologists, historians, and linguists—as
well as geologists. Several scholars, in this age of polymathy, worked with
competence in all these areas.
In limiting my own discussion to men later appropriated by professional
geologists as their own predecessors, I consciously work within the
framework that I am trying to debunk (or enlarge). I am, in other words,
treating the standard stories accepted by geologists for the discovery of time.
Professional historians have long recognized the false and cardboard
character of this self-serving mythology—and I make no claim for originality
in this respect— but their message has not seeped through to working
scientists, or to students.
My parochiality extends even further—to geography as well as discipline.
For I have selected for intensive discussion only the three cardinal actors on
the British geological stage—the primary villain and the two standard heroes.
The temporal order of these men also expresses the standard mythology
about the discovery of time. Thomas Burnet, villain by taint of theological
dogmatism, wrote his Sacred Theory of the Earth in the 1680s. The first hero,
James Hutton, worked exactly a cen- tury later, writing his initial version of
the Theory of the Earth in the 1780s. Charles Lyell, second hero and codifier
of modernity, then wrote his seminal treatise, Principles of Geology, just fifty
years later, in the 1830s. (Science, after all, does progress by acceleration, as
this halving of temporal distance to truth suggests.)
The standard mythology embodies a tradition that historians dismiss with
their most contemptuous label—whiggish, or the idea of history as a tale of
progress, permitting us to judge past figures by their role in fostering
enlightenment as we now understand it. In his Whig Interpretation of History
(1931), Herbert Butterfield deplores the strategy of English historians allied
with the Whig