planet's course; but history moves inexorably forward as it cycles. Dark chaos lies under Christ's left foot, marking our beginnings; but the bright star of our ending closes the circle of the great year.

Burnet and Steno as Intellectual Partners in the
Light of Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle

Since we use individuals to illustrate general attitudes, Burnet has been forced to play another, unhappy role in textbook histories. He becomes the symbol of constraining bibliolatry, with its Mosaic time-scale and miraculous paroxysms. He stands in traditional contrast with his contemporary Nicolaus Steno, the great Danish savant (later Bishop, in a conversion generally viewed as anomalous and retrogressive) whose Prodromus of 1669 marks the conventional inception of modern geology. Steno succeeded, we are told, because he adopted the universal procedures of scientific method so respected today. The introduction to the standard translation of the Prodromus calls Steno "a pioneer of the observational methods which dominate in modern science" (Hobbs, 1916, 169). The translator adds: "At a time when fantastic metaphysics were rife, Steno trusted only to induction based upon experiment and observation" (Winter, 1916, 179).

Burnet then becomes the symbol of those "absurdities of metaphysical speculation" (Winter, 1916, 182)—in explicit contrast with Steno, who saved science before switching to souls. Thus, we learn from Fenton and Fenton (1952, 22) that Burnet added nothing to science, "nor compared with Steno" as a general thinker. While Davies descends from sublimity to bathos with these words: "From the wisdom of Steno, we must now turn to the fanciful, but ingenious and extremely popular theory of the earth devised by Thomas Burnet" (1969, 68).