Soon after the appearance of Lord Kelvin's indictment of modern geology in 1868, the defence of the science was taken up by Huxley, who happened at the time to be President of the Geological Society of London. In his own inimitably brilliant way, half seriously, half playfully, this doughty combatant, with evident relish, tossed the physical arguments to and fro in the eyes of his geological brethren, as a barrister may flourish his brief before a sympathetic jury. He was willing to admit that 'the rapidity of rotation of the earth _may_ be diminishing, that the sun _may_ be waxing dim, or that the earth itself _may_ be cooling.' But he went on to add his suspicion that 'most of us are Gallios, who care for none of these things, being of opinion that, true or fictitious, they have made no practical difference to the earth, during the period of which a record is preserved in stratified deposits.'[84] For the indifference which their advocate thus professed on their behalf most geologists believed that they had ample justification. The limits within which the physicist would circumscribe the earth's history were so vague yet so vast, that whether the time allowed were 400 millions or 100 millions of years did not seem to them greatly to matter. After all, it was not the time that chiefly interested them, but the grand succession of events which the time had witnessed. That succession had been established on observations so abundant and so precise that it could withstand attack from any quarter, and it had taken as firm and lasting a place among the solid achievements of science as could be claimed for any physical speculations whatsoever. Whether the time required for the transaction of this marvellous earth-history was some millions of years more or some millions of years less did not seem to the geologists to be a question on which their science stood in antagonism with the principles of natural philosophy, but one which the natural philosophers might be left to settle at their own good pleasure.