Manchester, 21 March 1869 

Dear Moor, 

Lizzie’s case was pleurisy, which, however, took a remarkably 
quick course—not till last Tuesday> was the exudation on the 
right lung evident, and by this morning it had already vanished 
completely. She is getting up again today for the first time. 
Through a remarkable piece of divination, I diagnosed pleurisy for 
Gumpert on Sunday,° he examined her, found nothing, declared 
it was bronchitis (which was also present), in addition to catarrh in 
the lungs, and it was naturally rather annoying for him when the 
pleurisy declared itself after all. I naturally do not claim that it was 
present when he could not find it. 

Poor Léhrchen‘ musr Have HAD A HARD TIME oF Ir. Ten weeks in 

a 23 March - > 16 March -© 14 March - 4 Laura Lafargue 

childbed is no joke, and it is good that it is over. When they get 
there, Tussy and Jenny must give her and Lafargue too my hearty 
greetings. 

The explanation about Castille was very useful to me. The 
wisdom of Solomon Beesly returned herewith.’ It is the greatest 
nonsense. In time, this Comtism will confirm an even stronger 
version of that remark made by that man from Bonn about the 
Hegelians: they do not need to know about anything in order to 
write about everything. 

In Germany the conversion of the natural forces, for instance, 
heat into mechanical energy, etc., has given rise to a very absurd 
theory, which incidentally follows with a certain inevitability from 
Laplace’s old hypothesis, but is now displayed, as it were, with 
mathematical proofs: that the world is becoming steadily colder, 
that the temperature in the universe is levelling down and that, in 
the end, a moment will come when all life will be impossible and 
the entire world will consist of frozen spheres rotating round one 
another. I am simply waiting for the moment when the clerics 
seize upon this theory as the last word in materialism. It is 
impossible to imagine anything more stupid. Since, according to 
this theory, in the existing world, more heat must always be 
converted into other energy than can be obtained by converting 
other energy into heat, so the original hot state, out of which things 
have cooled, is obviously inexplicable, even contradictory, and thus 
presumes a god. Newton’s first impulse is thus converted into a 
first heating. Nevertheless, the theory is regarded as the finest and 
highest perfection of materialism; these gentlemen prefer to 
construct a world that begins in nonsense and ends in nonsense, 
instead of regarding these nonsensical consequences as proof that 
what they call natural law is, to date, only half-known to them. But 
this theory is all the dreadful rage in Germany. 

I’ve not yet seen the Zukunft. 

Tomorrow I shall send you stamps for one pound for the E. 
Jones demonstration. 

Best greetings. 

Your 
F. E.