viii Acknowledgments

James Hampton's Throne for Christ's second coming at the Na- tional Museum of American Art. I listened to Malcolm Miller, self- appointed sage of Chartres, reading medieval metaphors in glass and statuary. R. K. Merton then showed me what a vainglorious fool I had been in thinking I had discovered the origin of Newton's phrase about the shoulders of giants in the south transept of that greatest among cathedrals.

I owe a more profound and immediate debt to colleagues who have struggled to understand the history of geology. I present this book as a logical analysis of three great documents, but it is really a collective enterprise. I am embarrassed that I cannot now sort out and properly attribute the bits and pieces forged together here. I am too close to this subject. I have taught the discovery of time for twenty years, and have read the three documents over and over again (for I regard such repetition as the best measuring stick of an intellectual life-when new insights cease, move on to something else). I simply do not remember which pieces came from my own readings of Burnet, Hutton, and Lyell, and which from Hooykaas, or Rudwick, Porter, or a host of other thinkers who have inspired me-as if exogeny and endogeny could form separate categories in any case!

In the most immediate sense, I owe great thanks to Don Patinkin, of Hebrew University, Jerusalem-and to Eitan Chernov, Danny Cohen, and Rafi Falk, guides and friends during my visit. This book is a greatly elaborated and reworked version of the first series of Harvard-Jerusalem lectures, presented at Hebrew University in April 1985. Arthur Rosenthal, director of Harvard University Press, conceived this series and brought it to fruition-and to him as godfather my deepest thanks. I can only hope that I have set a worthy beginning to a series that, by time's arrow of progress, will soon supersede its inception (while I hope for some remembrance in time's cycle of memory).