ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the analogy between geology and human historiography itself. Charles Lyell's work in Italy in the winter of 1828-29 convinced him that fossil molluscs held the key to an understanding of the relatively recent, or ‘Tertiary’, epochs of the earth's history. The idea of language as a continually changing system was thus available to Charles Lyell as a conceptual resource from his general intellectual environment. The initial value of the analogy was that it suggested a possible explanation of the phenomenon of extinction, the reality of which Georges Cuvier's research had demonstrated for the first time beyond reasonable doubt. Charles Lyell then imagined itinerant ‘commissioners’ visiting the different provinces of the country in succession, taking a series of censuses and then leaving behind them a series of ‘statistical documents’ for each province.
