Science in succeeding centuries has established the age of the Earth as between four and five billion years, with an exceedingly long history of change and development.
Hutton's words, "we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end," which was in stark contrast to the prevailing Genesis creation story, which held that the Earth has existed for only a few thousand years. It was still hazardous in Hutton's time to oppose the young Earth creationism doctrine which was then dominant. Proponents of scientific theories which contradicted scriptural interpretations could not only lose their academic appointments but were legally answerable to charges of heresy and/or blasphemy, charges which, even as late as the 18th century (1700s) in Great Britain, sometimes resulted in a death sentence.
Hutton's comprehension of deep time as a crucial scientific concept was developed further by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-33). Naturalist and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin studied Lyell's book exhaustively during his expedition on the HMS Beagle in the 1830s.
Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.
Basin and Range was republished with four others and additional material in Annals of the Former World, a title McPhee borrowed from James Hutton's observation about the geologist's preoccupation with the "annals of a former world," the stories figuratively told by layers of rock laid down over many millions of years.
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (1999) is non-fiction book by Gregory Benford.