James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: A Machine without a History - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 67

proper theories as inductions from observed phenomena. Hutton was pressed
into service in one of the most flagrant mischaracterizations ever perpetrated
by the heroic tradition in the history of science. Hutton came to embody the
mystique of fieldwork against forces of reaction.
In this standard myth, Hutton discovered deep time because he formulated
the cardinal principle of empirical geology and used it to draw two central
conclusions from his fieldwork. We are told that Hutton devised the principle
of uniformitarianism, loosely translated in textbook catechism as "the present
is the key to the past." Using this guide, Hutton then observed, first , that
granite must be an intrusive rock, not a sediment (therefore a reflection of
uplifting powers, not a product of decay); and, second, that unconformities
provide direct evidence for multiple cycles of uplift and erosion. Hutton used
these two crucial observations as the basis for inducing a cyclical theory of
the world machine from field evidence.
The Huttonian legend did not begin right away. Lyell praised him highly
enough, but more as a man who tried to extend Newton's program from space
to time, than as a great empiricist (1830, I, 61-63). In a private letter (in K.
M. Lyell, 1881, II, 48), Lyell commented that Hutton's system showed no
great advance beyond Hooke or Steno.
The elevation of Hutton achieved its canonical form in the same work that
classified Burnet among the villains and presented the empiricist myth in its
most influential form—Sir Archibald Geikie's The Founders of Geology
(1897). Geikie's Hutton is a paragon of objectivity, a cardboard ideal. "In the
whole of Hutton's doctrine, he vigorously guarded himself against the
admission of any principle which could not be founded on observation. He
made no assumptions. Every step in his deductions was based upon actual
fact, and the facts were so arranged as to yield naturally and inevitably the
conclusions which he drew from them" (1905 ed., 314-315). Bowing to the
primal mystique of geology, Geikie identified the source of these rigorous
observations in fieldwork: "He went far afield in