Geology, Time and History

There is evidence of consciousness of natural time as far back as the Early Ice Age in recorded observations of the recurrent and successive appearances of the moon. The idea of geologic time was broached as part of the 17th century scientific revolution in the same milieu as the ideal time of rational mechanics, but the sense of time drawn from observations of the earth transcended the limitations of ideal physical law. Inapplicable to "…an unlimited assemblage of local instabilities…" (Maxwell, 1877 p. 14), the laws of physics by definition are independent of the very particulars of time and place that are the essence of historical science. In the 18th century, Hutton formulated a physically dynamic theory of earth history as an indefinitely repeating series of cycles, while continental geologists such as Arduino and Werner constructed an ordinal classification of the major rock formations from primary crystalline basement to the alluvium of the present surface. The detailed scale of geological time as expressed in the geologic column was made possible by the discovery (principally by G. Cuvier and A.Brongniart and independently W. Smith) of the principle of faunal succession. By 1836, a consensus on the main outlines of the structure and biologic, as well as lithologic, succession was reached that held almost up to the present day. With temporal succession, the static scala naturae of Aristotle became first the progressionism of the great chain of being and finally, Darwinian evolution. The idea of geologic time encompasses all that we have learned of the history of our earth and its life.