No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end

"The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which ... had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean," he wrote. "Here are three distinct successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our measurement of time, a thing of indefinite duration.... The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

 

James Hutton, cited in John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 79