TO GEOLOGY The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830. Rachel Laudan. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987. 278 pp. $27.50. BY JERE H. LIPPS A disparity exists in geology between causal and historical practitioners of the science. Perhaps most geologists aim to decipher the Earth’s history, but an ever-larger number is concerned with the causes of geological phenomena, making them more akin to physicists and chemists than to the British founding geologists typically held in suc

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987. 219 pp. $17.50. Spring comes and spring goes, and comes once again—"Time's Cycle." Each spring is unique, and so is marked—"Time's Arrow." Our experience with time is of cycles and of arrows, yet they interweave and confuse. Neither is right, neither is wrong. We accept them, and we overlook them. Geological time, its enormousness and h