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 64

I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when
Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution,
Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained
Huxley and Lyell at Down. Hutton was wealthy enough to be a full-time
intellectual when Edinburgh was the thinking capital of Europe, and when
David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Watt graced its supper clubs. Hutton
belonged to that extinct species of eighteenth-century thinker, the polymath
who took all knowledge for his province and moved with erudition between
philosophy and science (a distinction that Hutton's contemporaries did not
recognize). Most of Hutton's general treatises remain unpublished, and we
have little idea of the extent of his vision. But he devoted most attention to
developing a theory of the earth as a physical object existing for a purpose.
He therefore becomes, under modern taxonomies, a geologist—and by
modern mythologies, the father of geology.
Hutton has achieved this paternity because an English tradition 1 has claimed
him as the primary discoverer of deep time—and all geologists know in their
bones that nothing else from our profession has ever mattered so much.
For a historian, Hutton's rambling style provides the virtue of redundancy.
You can always tell what he regarded as important because he says it over
and over again. Few themes so pervade the thousand pages of his Theory of
the Earth as his wonder and conviction about time's vastness. This subject
even extracted some beautifully crafted and memorable lines from a man
renowned (unfairly, I think) as the all-time worst writer among great thinkers.
Consider the two most famous statements:
Time, which measures every thing in our idea, and is often deficient to our
schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing. (1788, 215)
1. I speak of language, not nationality. I know that Scotland isn't England, and don't
wish to write British for a common English-language tradition of interpretation.