James Hutton's Theory of the Earth: A Machine without a History - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 91

explain, at the same time, the apparent permanency of this surface on which
we dwell, and the great changes that appear to have been already made.
(1795, II, 467-468)
But we often have no direct data rooted in modern, observable processes. In
such cases, we must gather a multiplicity of past results and try to order them
as reasonable stages in the operation of a single historical process (as Darwin
did in arguing that fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and atolls represent three
stages in the subsidence of island platforms). Hutton uses this method to
interpret sequences of deposition and distortion of strata by uplift and tilting:
All those strata of various materials, although originally uniform in their
structure and appearance as a collection of stratified materials, have acquired
appearances which are often difficult to reconcile with that of their original,
and is only to be understood by an examination of a series in those objects, or
that gradation which is sometimes to be perceived from the one extreme state
to the other, that is from their natural to their most changed state. (1795, II,
51)
Hutton's one expression of history: a small irony
If history be narrative moving somewhere through unique stages, then we
cannot find history in Hutton's world machine. Only once in his entire
treatise do we get a whiff of change as directional progress. This concept
appears nowhere in his science (or even in his own words), but only in the
flowery and obligatory puff of introductory praise to the monarch who served
as titular head and sponsor of the Royal Society of Edinburgh—ironically,
since he was America's tormentor so negatively described by Mr. Jefferson in
the Declaration of Independence, none other than George III, "a monarch
who has distinguished his reign by the utility of his institutions for improving
the elegant arts, as well as by the splendor and success of his undertakings to
extend the knowledge of Nature" (from Buccleugh's introduction to volume 1
of the Transactions, where Hutton's 1788 treatise appeared).