Sir Oliver Lodge is a scientist with a worldwide reputation, whose opinions on the structure of atoms, on X-rays or on Hertzian waves command instant attention. But when he expounds such remote and multifarious subjects as “free will and determinism,” “Bergson’s philosophy,” “universal arbitration,” “the production and sale of drink,” “the functions of money,” “charity organization” and a score of others, he rouses the suspicions of the wary. “Nobody could possibly be as wise as Daniel Webster looked,” and nobody could possibly be as wise as an authoritative knowledge of these topics implies. Yet the learned knight has acquitted himself creditably. The essays are random papers, addresses at commencement exercises and the like, as good as such occasions warranted, though hardly, in some cases, worth the dignity of permanent print. Sir Oliver Lodge, despite his rise to the presidency of Birmingham University, has escaped the commonest of British diseases—snobbery. His eyes are not blinded, by fatty layers of prosperity, to the misery that stalks about the country. He is not elated at the sight of those piles of iron and slag, those miles of furnaces and factories, those leagues of rabbit-hutch cottages, which stretch, northwest of Birmingham, a “Black Country” that even Satan might disown, the heart of manufacturing England, a blasted region where no blade of grass is green and no life can be clean and elevated. The author is saturated with the feeling and teaching of Ruskin, in whom these blighted acres, and other fair districts which Mammom had despoiled, raised such righteous tempests of wrath. It is refreshing to find in high places the gospel of Ruskin, that half-forgotten prophet of social righteousness, re-stated with conviction and re-applied to fresh problems. Sir Oliver is grateful to the organized charity workers who “immerse themselves in this mass of misery and incipient or threatening degradation, in hope that they may raise individuals out of it”; but, with more pleasure, he pleads for that statesmanship which will root out the causes of wretchedness. He must be a whole-hearted supporter of Lloyd-George’s schemes of social insurance, old-age pensions, taxation of land values and better education. With tax-payers’ associations he is surely unpopular, for he actually denounces thrift in government and advocates spending more and ever more on public undertakings. He laments that a surplus in the national revenue is made the excuse for lowering taxes, while there are a thousand good objects on which the surplus could be spent. Perhaps that argument is the easier because, like the great majority, he owns not a foot of soil in what is euphemistically styled “his” country. Were he in America he would appear before boards of estimate and the like and plead for more money for schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and health work.