Deep time

[1] The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton;[2][3] his "system of the habitable Earth" was a deistic mechanism keeping the world eternally suitable for humans.

[9][10] Other scientists such as Georges Cuvier put forward ideas of past ages, and geologists such as Adam Sedgwick incorporated Werner's ideas into concepts of catastrophism; Sedgwick inspired his university student Charles Darwin to exclaim "What a capital hand is Sedgewick [sic] for drawing large cheques upon the Bank of Time!".

[11] In a competing theory, Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833) developed Hutton's comprehension of endless deep time as a crucial scientific concept into uniformitarianism.

As a young naturalist and geological theorist, Darwin studied the successive volumes of Lyell's book exhaustively during the Beagle survey voyage in the 1830s, before beginning to theorise about evolution.

H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley regarded the difficulties of coping with the concept of deep time as exaggerated: "The use of different scales is simply a matter of practice," they said in The Science of Life (1929).