A personal connection between the two had already been formed as a matter of course. Darwin, almost confined for years to his isolated home at Down owing to his constant ill-health, had received a copy of the _Radiolaria_, and the correspondence had begun. The work had as yet met with little encouragement from the ranks of exact scientists. It cannot have been a matter of indifference to Darwin personally that so distinguished a work, a real model of professional research, had come over to him. Proofs of the _Morphology_ were sent over to Down before the book was ready for publication. Darwin read German with difficulty, but in this case he was stimulated to make an unusual effort. At last Haeckel himself made his appearance at the master’s home. It seemed as though he had to visit him in person to receive his blessing. It was, at all events, a happy moment in the history of Darwinism when the two men first met whose names will be inseparable in literature. This was in October, 1866; Darwin had sent his carriage to bring Haeckel from the station. A sunny autumn morning smiled on the homely and beautiful English landscape with its bright woods and golden broom and red erica and evergreen oaks. Haeckel has described their first meeting. “When the carriage drew up before Darwin’s house, with its ivy and its shadowy elms, the great scientist stepped out of the shade of the creeper-covered porch to meet me. He had a tall and venerable appearance, with the broad shoulders of an Atlas that bore a world of thought: a Jove-like forehead, as we see in Goethe, with a lofty and broad vault, deeply furrowed by the plough of intellectual work. The tender and friendly eyes were overshadowed by the great roof of the prominent brows. The gentle mouth was framed in a long, silvery white beard. The noble expression of the whole face, the easy and soft voice, the slow and careful pronunciation, the natural and simple tenor of his conversation, took my heart by storm in the first hour that we talked together, just as his great work had taken my intelligence by storm at the first reading. I seemed to have before me a venerable sage of ancient Greece, a Socrates or an Aristotle.”