particularly in its evidence for organic progress from fish to reptile, to mammal, to man.

The argument needs, and shall receive, more elaboration (see pages 137–142). For now, and to allay the discomfort of unresolved puzzles, I simply point out that future ichthyosaurs represent but one of Lyell's speculative forays for saving the steady state of life's complexity from a fossil record that spoke for progress. We may see, Lyell argues, an advance in design from fish to ichthyosaur to whale, but we view only the rising arc of a great circle that will come round again, not a linear path to progress. We are now, Lyell wrote just before his reveries on ichthyosaurs, in the winter of the "great year," or geological cycle of climates. Tougher environments demand hardier, warm-blooded creatures. But the summer of time's cycle will come round again, and "then might those genera of animals return . . ."

Charles Lyell, Self-Made in Cardboard

Lyell's Rhetoric

As De la Beche had noted in caricature, Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession—a barrister no less, skilled in the finest points of verbal persuasion. Thus, although early sections in previous chapters on Burnet and Hutton treat cardboard histories as preached by textbooks, the Lyellian myth is a double whammy. The legends of Burnet and Hutton are later constructions, but Lyell built his own edifice with the most brilliant brief ever written by a scientist. This brief, moreover, established forever the cardboard history that fueled the emerging legends of Burnet and Hutton as well. Lyell constructed the self-serving history that has encumbered the study of earthly time ever since.

The first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology (published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833) begins with five chapters on the history of geology and its lessons for establishing a proper approach to a modern study of the earth. Lyell's great treatise is not, as so