Once a year scientists of all disciplines came together to parade their most recent discoveries, their ‘wild miracles’. Held in a different place each year, meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were a forum for hot debate on current controversies. Consequently, in the 1890s, as arguments raged about the age of the Earth, most BAAS meetings had an ‘Age’ discussion, and the Liverpool Meeting in 1896 was no exception. That year it was the turn of the biologists to defend their corner and Professor Poulton did this with fierce opposition to Kelvin and his meagre twenty million years. Responding to a challenge from Kelvin – ‘the burden of proof [falls] upon those who hold to the vaguely vast age derived from sedimentary geology’ – Poulton brilliantly put the case for an ancient planet, and suggested that for biological purposes the Earth must be more than one thousand million years old. He argued that in order for the oldest fossils then discovered to be as highly evolved as they were seen to be, inordinate amounts of time must have previously elapsed while life forms evolved to such a complex stage of development.

Unfortunately, Kelvin was not listening because he was attending the session held in the Physics and Mathematics Section where all the talk was of ‘mysterious rays’.