Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 23

The Burnet of Textbooks
Burnet emerges from our textbooks as the archetype of a biblical idolatry that
reined the progress of science. We may extend this tradition of commentary
right back to the other two protagonists of this topic—to James Hutton, who
wrote of Burnet, "This surely cannot be considered in any other light than as
a dream, formed upon a poetic fiction of a golden age" (1795,1,271); and to
Charles Lyell, who remarked that "even Milton had scarcely ventured in his
poem to indulge his imagination so freely . . . as this writer, who set forth
pretensions to profound philosophy" (1830, 37).
No one professed the empiricist faith in purer form than the leading Scottish
geologist, Archibald Geikie. His Founders of Geology (1897) promoted the
tradition of heroes as field workers, and villains as speculators. As a
"standard" history of geology for several generations, this topic became the
source for much continuing textbook dogma. Geikie included Burnet's topic
among the "monstrous doctrines" that infested late-seventeenth-century
science: "Nowhere did speculation run so completely riot as in England with
regard to theories of the origin and structure of our globe" (1905 ed., 66).
Geikie then presented his empiricist solution—that facts must precede theory
—to this retrospective dilemma: "It was a long time before men came to
understand that any true theory of the earth must rest upon evidence
furnished by the globe itself, and that no such theory could properly be
framed until a large body of evidence had been gathered together" (1905 ed.,
66).
Horace B. Woodward, in his official history of the Geological Society of
London (1911, 13) placed Burnet's work among the "romantic and
unprofitable labors" of its time. From a peculiar source came the most
interesting of all critiques. George McCready Price, grandfather and
originator of the pseudoscience known to its adherents by the oxymoron
"scientific creationism," considered Burnet a special threat to his system.
Price wished to affirm biblical literalism by an inductive approach based
strictly on fieldwork. On the old principle that the enemy within is more
dangerous than the