adolescent yearning for something finer than cold mutton tallow ripened into his life's main intention, which has been to kindle the imagination, to magnify, glorify and energize the will and reason of man, and to persuade our generation that the human will and reason are the legitimate successors to a creative and governing Providence.
Mr. Wells began his literary career with the publication of a series of fantastic romances, such as "The Time Machine," showing a "chronic" aeroplane in which one could visit the year 2000; "The Island of Doctor Moreau," in which a surgeon with infinitely cruel and protracted operations transforms the lower animals into the shape of men; "The Invisible Man," a study in applied chemistry; "The War of the Worlds," in which the planet Mars bombards Southern England with canisters full of super-scientists who march on London with heat-rays and gas attack, decisively anticipating the Germans; "When the Sleeper Wakes," a new Rip Van Winkle; "The First Men in the Moon," "The Sea Lady," in which a mermaid vamps a most eligible young man, who is already engaged to a suitable young mortal; "The Food of the Gods," more applied chemistry, directed to making people grow forty feet tall.
I am not sure that most of us when these romances first appeared saw anything in them but exciting yarns, "fairy tales of science," the mere exuberance of Mr. Wells's imagination. I notice, for example, that Mr. J. D. Beresford, one of Mr. Wells's innumerable disciples in fiction, classes "The Island of Dr. Moreau" among the "essays in pure fancy," though he notes that some absurd reviewers imagined it to be a defense of vivisection. Mr. Beresford's little book
