Geological time, its enormousness and humankind's place in it, is the great intellectual contribution of geology. In his latest book, Stephen Jay Gould shows us how its discovery embraced both time's cycle and time's arrow, and how, because these metaphors went unrecognized, we misinterpret geologic time's discoverers. We have cheered and booed the wrong peopie and made "cardboard history."
Gould selected only three main historical works for scrutiny: Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680-1690), James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1795) and Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-1833), plus short discussions of Nicolas Steno's Prodromus (1669) and the sculpture of James Hampton (1964). Hampton? Yes, a janitor from Washington, D.C., who constructed a monumental "throne of heaven," with which Gould exemplifies the power of time's cycle and time's arrow on human thinking. The great geological thinkers of the past were not the only ones who struggled with these ...
