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 View

Retreating from the Uniformity of State,
or Why Lyell Became an Evolutionist

Mountains arise and erode through time—"the seas go in and the seas go out," as the old geologists' motto proclaims. Uniformity of state might well describe physical history. But Lyell's extension of time's cycle to the history of life had always seemed implausible to most colleagues—especially in the light of human origins at the very summit of time's mountain. Lyell had provided a rationale for nonprogressionism in life's history (see pages 137–142), but his arguments were shaky on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Thus, when Lyell, late in his career, finally surrendered his uncompromising commitment to time's cycle, he capitulated by admitting,