Haeckel, Darwin, And The Idiot-Physiognomy

Wilhelm Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, tr. Joseph McCabe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), 146-7:

Darwin was never a handsome man from the æsthetic point of view. When he wanted to sail with Fitz-Roy, 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.