"Based on the Tarner lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1996."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 653-699) and index.

Understanding the earth -- Naturalists, philosophers, and others -- Sciences of the earth -- The theory of the earth -- Transposing history into the earth -- Problems with fossils -- Reconstructing geohistory -- A new science of "geology"? -- Denizens of a former world -- Geognosy enriched into geohistory -- The gateway to the deep past -- Earth's last revolution.

In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh joined the long-running theological debate on the age of the earth by famously announcing that creation had occurred on October 23, 4004 B.C. Although widely challenged during the Enlightenment, this belief in a six-thousand-year-old planet was only laid to rest during a revolution of discovery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this relatively brief period, geologists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth-and the relatively recent arrival of human life. Highlighting a discovery that radically altered existing pe.

Description based on print version record.