Bursting the Limits of Time
by Martin Rudwick
Rudwick is an historian of tremendous range and learning and it is all on display in this book. It is a history of the establishment of what he calls ‘geohistory’, which is a mode of thought, a way of thinking about the earth as something with a history. This mode of thought grew up in the late 18th and early 19th century in Europe. Specifically, Rudwick traces the early history of what we now think of as separate sciences, geology, palaeontology, and the study of so called ‘deep time’.
