The first pair of telephonic instruments that Alexander Graham Bell brought to Europe were presented by him to Lord Kelvin, who immediately put them to use by connecting his house with that of his brother-in-law and assistant, Doctor J. T. Bottomley. The first electrically lighted house in the world was the first in the old world to be connected by telephone for purposes professional, social, personal, and domestic. For how could Kelvin, who was always peering into the future, be afraid of new things? He peered into the past, too, for you remember how he startled the orthodox mind by his calculations regarding the age of the earth. Lord Salisbury, just before he became Prime Minister for the last time (his long term of 1895-1902) was Chancellor of the University of Oxford and at the same time President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At Oxford, {107} in a memorable year, and in behalf of the University of which he was chancellor, he welcomed the association of which he was president, and he reminded his learned listeners that Lord Kelvin, whom he alluded to as "the greatest living master of natural science amongst us", was the first to point out that the amount of time required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory for the working out of the process of evolution which they had imagined "could not be conceded without assuming the existence of a totally different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted." Hot things cool. The once seething earth has cooled and is cooling. So many million years ago it must have been hotter than now by calculable degrees. "But if at any time it was hotter at the surface by fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, life would then have been impossible on this planet." Lord Kelvin assured us that organic life on earth cannot have existed more than a hundred million years ago. So if you believed in Archbishop Ussher's chronology, and niggardly dealt out to the earth an age of only six thousand years, or went so far as Professor Tait with his ten million, you had, by Kelvin's figuring, a tremendous margin to fill up somehow. Of course the orthodox jumped and squealed. But the geologists and biologists stamped and yelled. Some of them wanted more than Kelvin's stingy allowance; they wanted not one hundred million years, but hundreds of millions. And there was a pretty ferment in the camps!