There was a most appalling illustration of this in the Scientific Congress, held in September, 1863. Nothing is more amusing to-day than to run through the yellow and almost unknown papers of the Congress. They are illuminating to some extent. An idea that belongs to humanity is openly brought into the debate for the first time. Ages lie behind this hour. We must grant all that savours of human comedy, of triviality even, in such an assembly, but after all we must see in it the swell and clash of great waves. Haeckel spoke for the first time on Darwin’s theory, at a spot from which the waves were bound to spread through the whole scientific culture of the land. Virchow, afterwards his bitter opponent, supported him. All the deepest questions and consequences of Darwinism were mooted with the first vibrant accents. It was a great and unforgettable hour. The first speaker at the Congress on the Sunday evening, September 19, 1863, was Haeckel. We must remember the charm that attached to his person even outwardly, the direct charm that did not need any allusion to his growing repute in zoology. It was the charm that had been felt by the simple folk of uncultured Italy, who had never heard even the name of the science. Darwin was never a handsome man from the æsthetic point of view. When he wanted to sail with FitzRoy, it was a very near question whether the splenetic captain would not reject him because he did not like his nose. His forehead had so striking a curve that Lombroso, the expert, could put him down as having “the idiot-physiognomy” in his _Genius and Insanity_. At the time when he wrote the _Origin of Species_ he had not the patriarchal beard that is inseparable from his image in our minds; he was bald, and his chin clean shaved. The prematurely bent form of the invalid could never have had much effect in such a place, no matter what respect was felt for him. Haeckel, young and handsome, was an embodiment of the _mens sana in corpore sano_. He rose above the grey heads of science, as the type of the young, fresh, brilliant generation. It was an opponent at this Congress, who sharply attacked the new ideas, that spoke of the “colleague in the freshness of youth” who had brought forward the subject. He brought with him the highest thing that a new idea can associate with: the breath of a new generation, of a youth that greets all new ideas with a smiling courage. Behind this was the thought of Darwin himself, a wave that swept away all dams.