Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle 167
nineteen of its twenty-six chapters chronicle the Tertiary and most others discuss Tertiary problems prominently. The volume ends with a sixty-page appendix, reproducing in toto Deshayes's charts for the duration of Tertiary mollusks and the percentage of living species in each stratigraphic unit. We have no trouble detecting Lyell's main interest; for this is no impartial text, allotting space in proportion to time or preserved strata. Most working geologists could tell you that Lyell named the epochs of the Tertiary. They know this as a curious little fact, proving that the apostle of uniformitarianism also did some field- work. If we could only learn to grasp the intimate—indeed necessary—connection of this achievement with his vision of time's cycle, then we would understand the power of Lyell's system. Lyell broke through the sterility of Hutton's ahistorical view, and showed that the vision of time's stately cycle could serve as a research tool for geology's basic activity, the ordering of events in time. Lyell's system works because we inhabit a world of history—by the primal criterion of uniqueness, based on temporal context, for each phenomenon. Charles Lyell was the historian of time's cycle. The Partial Unraveling of Lyell's World ViewRetreating from the Uniformity of State,
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