Geology Reference
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anything in present nature to be compared with the disorder of these waters;
all the poetry and all the hyperboles that are used in the description of storms
and raging seas, were literally true in this, if not beneath it. The ark was
really carried to the tops of the highest mountains, and into the places of the
clouds, and thrown down again into the deepest gulfs. (84)
Burnet's closing words again identify his treatise as a work of historical
narrative: "There we leave [the earth]; having conducted it for the space of
seven thousand years, through various changes from a dark chaos to a bright
star" (377). 7
Since Burnet was a fine prose stylist, we can also trace his primary
commitments by recording his metaphors. The direction, or vector, of history
is a "channel" (66) or "progress" along "the line of time" (257); while the
narrative quality of history receives, over and over again, its evident analogy
with theater: "To see, when this theater is dissolved, where we shall act next,
and what parts. What saints and heroes, if I may so say, will appear upon that
stage; and with what luster and excellency" (241).
Burnet unites his criteria of vector and narrative in another obvious analogy:
the history of our planet with the growth of a tree. This passage also includes
his finest defense of the beauty and necessity of historical analysis:
We must not only consider how things are, but how they came to be so. 'Tis
pleasant to look upon a tree in the summer, covered with its green leaves,
decked with blossoms, or laden with fruit, and casting a pleasing shade under
its spreading boughs; but to consider how this tree with all its furniture,
sprang from a little seed; how nature shaped it, and fed it, in its infancy and
growth; added new parts, and still advanced it by little and little, till it came
to this greatness and perfection, this, methinks, is another sort of pleasure,
more rational, less common . . . So to view this
7. Note how Burnet incorporates both features of history—the vector of direction
(dark chaos to bright star) and the rich pageant of narrative (various changes).
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