“Time changed for the Romantics. Whether from the rise of industrialism that made visible the accelerating edge of the Anthropocene, from the contrasting awareness of geological time, the effects of accurate time-keeping, or the collapse of time and space made possible by steam travel, their period's momentum seemed resolutely forward, while at the same time operating 'in widely varying scales, paces and planes'. That change came early for Scots, who numbered among them Watt, of the steam engine (1765), and Hutton, who published the seminal Theory of the Earth (1788). For Walter Scott, who belonged to the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1810 and served as its President from 1820, that society having published Hutton's theory, and who knew Watt personally, time's many turns would have been particularly evident.”