Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 22

Noah's ark upon the waves). The waters retreat, leaving the cracked crust of
our current earth, "a broken and confused heap of bodies." In times to come,
as the prophets foretold, the earth shall be consumed by fire, then made
smooth again as descending soot and ashes reestablish concentric perfection.
Christ shall reign for a thousand years with his resurrected saints on this new
globe. Finally, after a last triumphant battle against evil forces, the final
judgment shall allocate all bodies to their proper places, the just shall ascend
to heaven, and the earth (under Christ's right foot), no longer needed as a
human abode, shall become a star.
This tale embodies time's arrow at its grandest—a comprehensive rip-roaring
narrative, a distinctive sequence of stages with a definite beginning, a clear
trajectory, and a particular end. Who could ask for a better story?
But Emmet's frontispiece records more than time's arrow. The globes are
arranged as a circle, not a line or some other appropriate metaphor of
exclusively sequential narrative—and Christ, the Word who was with God at
the beginning, straddles the inception and culmination. Consider also, the
careful positioning of globes, with our current earth in the center between
two symmetrical flanks. Note the conscious correspondences between right
and left flanks: the perfect earth following descent of the elements from
chaos (at 3:00), and directly across at 9:00, the earth made perfect again after
particles descend from the conflagration; or the earth in extremis, first by
water then by fire, on either side of its current ruined state.
In other words, Burnet displays his narrative (time's arrow) in the context of
time's cycle—an eternal divine presence at top, a circular arrangement of
globes beginning and ending in immanence, a complex set of
correspondences between our past and future.
This same picture also embodies, and equally well, the dubious reasons for
Burnet's status as a primal villain of the history of geology, a symbol of the
major impediment to its discovery of deep time. For we see the earth's history
intimately entwined with, indeed dictated by, a strictly literal reading of the
sacred text.