1906] Sir Oliver Lodge 137 



dexterity when I got him to help me to my feet from the sofa on which 

 I was, when the sitting was over. 



" 15th April (Easter Sunday). — It being a beautiful day I was taken 

 out for the first time in a kind of invalid chair, where I am able to lie 

 flat, to Rotten Row, and lay there in the sun looking at the hyacinths 

 and tulips by the Serpentine pond head. No smart people to be 

 seen, only shopkeepers and working men of the London variety. 



"21st April. — To Qouds at last. I thought I should never get 

 there, my journey having been so often put off by my illnesses, but all 

 has gone successfully, and I have travelled up in my wheeled chair 

 from Semley station. There is the usual Easter family party in the 

 house, with Arthur Balfour, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Butcher, M.P. 



" 22nd April. — I was able to get downstairs this afternoon and to 

 lie in the smoking room, where they all came to talk to me, Arthur 

 Balfour with much kindly unction giving me a two-handed greeting. 

 We had not met here since September, 1887. This time we did not 

 talk any politics, but art, poetry, and science, the last especially with 

 Lodge. Lodge, though somewhat pompous, is a good fellow, and 

 talks well on his own subjects, and, as I had just been reading 

 Haeckel's ' Life,' and being engaged on my ' Religion of Happiness,' 

 I was able to discuss materialism with him to some effect. He is 

 really much more of a materialist than his books suggest, and except 

 that he believes in a future life and some kind of God, there is not much 

 difference between us. He admits the probability of a material origin 

 of life through spontaneous generation, and his God is not God the 

 Creator but a very shadowy being devoid of personality. 



" 2yd April. — Lodge has gone back to Birmingham but he came 

 up to my room for a final talk before he left. He is grateful to me 

 for having cured a toothache he had with a small dose of morphia. He 

 has left his book against Haeckel with me to read and invites me to 

 answer it in print. 



" Percy tells me he was present at the celebrated conference at Oxford 

 in i860 when Huxley defended Darwin's theory, and the Bishop of 

 Oxford, Wilberforce, denounced it. He remembers Haeckel being 

 there in support of Huxley, which is curious, seeing that Haeckel's 

 biographer says that Haeckel did not till two years later accept Dar- 

 winism. 



" Arthur Balfour has been doing a rest cure for some time in Lon- 

 don, recovering from his political defeat, and is still an invalid. I 

 find him singularly unaware of current events, as he still refuses to 

 read newspapers, expecting others to supply him with news of what 

 goes on. An odd instance of this took place to-day. He received a 

 telegram by mistake addressed ' Balfour, London,' from San Francisco, 

 telling him that some property had been saved from the earthquake, 



