He considered rock strata equivalent to planetary revolutions - unchanging manifestations of physical laws, without any untidy historical significance. An admirer of Newtonian precision and regularity, Hutton never thought of reading the planet's historyįrom rock strata as we do today.

Was not based on field observations but on his wishful, speculative confusion of geological process with Newtonian physics.

Hutton's theory of the earth as a geological clockwork of eroding continents balanced against uplifting ocean basins Gould shows that the actualities of Hutton's and Lyell's work were, if anything, the opposite of the textbook legend. Lyell demonstrated that the continents and oceans had not formed through biblical catastrophe, but had developed over millions of years through gradual erosion, deposition and uplift. By interpreting the geological observations recorded in Hutton's ''Theory of the Earth'' (1795), the legend goes, Of empirical knowledge amassed through the fieldwork of the 18th-century Scotsman James Hutton. Old tradition of biblically inspired speculation about the earth's past, a tradition exemplified by such 17th-century works as Thomas Burnet's ''Sacred Theory of the Earth,'' and drawing on a new body The textbooks maintain that Lyell ''discovered'' geological or ''deep'' time (in John McPhee's phrase) by rejecting an The Lyellian outrage (as the honorable gentleman would have been pleased to hear) is not a historical factīut a legend perpetuated by geology textbooks of the last century. Gould, a professor of geology and zoology at Harvard University, proceeds to demolish it. Having elaborated this bit of scientific melodrama, Mr. the notion of an almost incomprehensible immensity, with human habitation restricted to a millimicrosecond at the very end!'' Gould adds what mightīe called a Lyellian outrage (although the Victorian barrister and natural philosopher Charles Lyell would doubtless have been distressed at the term): the discovery of ''the great temporal limitation imposed by geology upon Listed a Galilean outrage (the earth's peripheral cosmic position), a Darwinian one (the human species' simian evolutionary origin) and a Freudian one (the mind's subconscious irrationality). had to endure from the hand of science.'' Freud STEPHEN JAY GOULD begins this lively, scholarly book by adding to Sigmund Freud's list of ''great outrages upon its naive self-love'' that humanity ''has. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. TIME'S ARROW, TIME'S CYCLE Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy DAVID RAINS WALLACE David Rains Wallace is the author of ''The Untamed Garden,'' a collection of essays, and co-author of the forthcoming ''Drylands,'' about North American desert evolution. June 14, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition The New York Times: Book Review Search Article

Time's arrow time's cycle