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Kelvin’s calculation carried enormous authority, thanks both to his eminence and to the manner in which he seemed to have applied ‘hard’ science and ‘pure’ mathematics to a field that had previously been the victim of woolly thinking. The mature and respectable science of physics had set straight the immature new discipline of geology. Darwin was chastened; he considered the age limit that Kelvin had placed on the Earth to be the most serious and credible argument against his carefully worked out theory, which demanded immense epochs of time. The scientist Fleeming Jenkin summarized the argument: ‘The estimates of geologists must yield before the more accurate methods of computation, and these show that our world cannot have been habitable for more than an infinitely insufficient period for the execution of the Darwinian transmutation.’ Darwin himself referred to Kelvin as his ‘sorest trouble’ and an ‘odious spectre’.