ible events, while time's cycle is the intelligibility of timeless order and lawlike structure. We must have both.

Caveats

This book has a limited, and rather self-serving, domain and pur- pose. It is no conventional work of scholarship, but a quest for personal understanding of key documents usually misinterpreted (at least by me in my first readings, before I grasped the role of vision and metaphor in science). I claim absolutely no originality for the theme of time's arrow and time's cycle—for this dichotomy has been explored by many students of time, from Mircea Eliade, Paolo Rossi, J. T. Eraser, and Richard Morris in our generation, back through Nietzsche to Plato. Many historians of geology (from Reijer Hooykaas, to C. C. Gillispie, to M. J. S. Rudwick, to G. L. Davies and others) have also recognized its influence, but have not worked out its full sway through textual analysis.

In addition, this book uses an almost reactionary method that, I pray, will not offend my colleagues in the history of science. It rests, first of all, as Rossi (1984) exemplifies so well in contrast, on restrictive taxonomies. The discovery of time is scarcely the work of three thinkers in Great Britain (and I use them only because I am trying to disperse the traditional myth from within). Moreover, I have followed the limited and unfashionable method of explication des textes. This work is a close analysis of the central logic in the first editions of three seminal documents in the history of geology. I do not maintain that such a myopic procedure can substitute for true history, especially since the greatest contemporary advances in our understanding of science have emerged from the opposite strategy of expansive analysis and exploration of social contexts. My admiration for this work is profound. I could not have begun to conceive this book without insights provided by broadened horizons that this expansive work has provided for all of us. I do