Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 50

very course of human affairs, which it had so lately condemned and
destroyed. We may be assured therefore, that, upon the dissolution of a
world, a new order of things, both as to nature ind providence, always
appears. (249)
Burnet's discussion of the second, or future, cycle weaves a subtle interplay
between elements of repetition (to display order and plan), and strands of
difference (to permit a recognizable history). He stresses the detailed
similarity between two destructions that seem so different—the deluges (as
he calls them both) of water and fire. Both were global and both required a
union of agents from above and below the earth's surface: rain from above
meeting an upwelling layer of water breaking through the crust, and lightning
above joining with subterranean flames and lavas of exploding volcanoes:
"There is a great analogy to be observed betwixt the two deluges, of water
and of fire; not only as to the bounds of them . . . but as to the general causes
and sources upon which they depend, from above and from below" (277).
But the changes of history create uniqueness within these striking
similarities. The details of narrative make each repetition a separate story.
Fire and water destroy differently: "The earth must be re- duced into a fluid
mass, in the nature of a chaos, as it was at first; but this last will be a fiery
chaos, as that was watery; and from this state it will emerge again into a
paradisiacal world" (288).
Burnet wishes to discern more than simple difference from cycle to cycle. He
tries to detect a vector of progress as well. Destruction by fire must yield
something even better than the first paradise; the cycles roll onward. Burnet
claims that fire can purge and purify more fully than any process operating
during the first cycle of the earth's past: "Nature here repeats the same work,
and in the same method; only the materials are now a little more refined and
purged by fire" (324).
We now see why Burner's frontispiece captures the essence of his system so
clearly and succinctly. It shows the detailed correspondences between
presenr and future, the two grear cycles of our