Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 32

surface. The flood, he declared, occurred when this original crust cracked,
permitting the thick, underlying layer of water to rise from the abyss (Figure
2.3).
This interpretation of the flood allowed Burnet to specify conditions both
before and after. Nothing much has happened since the deluge, only some
inconsequential erosion of postdiluvian topography. (Burnet's geology lacked
a concept of repair; processes of ordinary times could only follow the dictates
of Isaiah 40 and erode the mountain to fill the valleys, thus smoothing and
leveling the surface.)
The earth's current surface was fashioned by the deluge (Figure 2.4). It is, in
short, a gigantic ruin made of cracked fragments from the original crust.
Ocean basins are holes, mountains the edges of crustal fragments broken and
turned upon their side. "Say but that they are a ruin, and you have in one
word explained them all" (101). Burnet's descriptions and metaphors all
record his view of our current earth as a remnant of destruction-a "hideous
ruin," "a broken and confused heap of bodies," "a dirty little planet."
Burnet then proceeded backward (in Book II) to reconstruct the perfect earth
before the deluge. Scripture specifies an original chaos of particles (Figure
2.5), and physics dictates their sorting as a series of concentric layers, denser
at the center (Figure 2.6). (Since Burnet regarded the solid crust as a thin and
light froth, denser water formed a layer beneath—and a source for the
deluge.)
This perfect earth housed the original paradise of Eden. Its surface was
featureless and smooth. Rivers ran from high latitudes and dissipated in the
dry tropics (Figure 2.7). (They flowed, in Burnet's reversed concept of the
earth's shape, because the poles stood slightly higher above the center than
the equator.) A planet with such perfect radial symmetry bore no irregularity
to tilt its axis. Hence the earth rotated bolt upright and Eden, located at a mid-
latitude, enjoyed perpetual spring. The salubrious conditions of this earthly
paradise nurtured the early patriarchal life-spans of more than nine hundred
years. But the deluge was truly paradise lost. The earth, made asymmetric,
tilted to its present angle of some