" In 1987, Hutton’s eighteenth-century discovery was acclaimed by the eminent science writer, Stephen Jay Gould. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, he wrote of Hutton: ‘He burst the boundaries of time, thereby establishing geology’s most distinctive and transforming contribution to human thought – Deep Time.’35 The discovery, said Gould, imposed a ‘great temporal limitation’ upon human importance: ‘the notion of an almost incomprehensible immensity, with human habitation restricted to a millimicrosecond at the very end! "

― Brenda Maddox , Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life