"And why might not birds and fishes endure one long night as well as those and other animals endure many in Greenland" (334).

Burnet therefore emerges from this correspondence with the greatest of all scientific heroes as more committed to the reign of natural law, and more willing to embrace historical explanations. He ends his letter to Newton by describing a singular event of time's arrow, the great comet of 1680 then hanging over the skies of London. "Sir we are all so busy in gazing upon the comet, and what do you say at Cambridge can be the cause of such a prodigious coma as it had" (327). Mr. Halley, mutual friend of Newton and Burnet, also gazed in awe at this comet. Two years later, still inspired by this spectacular sight, he observed a smaller comet, and eventually predicted its return on a seventy-six-year cycle. This smaller object, Halley's Comet, now resides in my sky as I write this chapter-a primary signal of time's cycle.

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle:
Conflict and Resolution

In focusing upon Burnet's rationalist methodology, revisionists who wish to identify something of value in his work have missed an important opportunity—in part, because they rely exclusively upon text and ignore pictures. I view Burnet's frontispiece as the finest expression ever published of the tension between two complementary views of time—the ancient contrast of time's arrow and time's cycle. I studied Burnet's text again, with this perspective drawn from his frontispiece, and understood it in a new light (after half a dozen previous readings). I saw the Sacred Theory as a playground for Burnet's struggle to combine the metaphors into a unified view of history that would capture the salient features of each-the narrative power of the arrow, and the immanent regularity of the cycle. I think that Burnet's struggle was quite conscious; his frontispiece is constructed with consummate care.