o his. They constitute the body, the serious
reality to which all the rest of this little book is so much dress,
adornment and concealment. Very many of us, I believe, are dreaming of
the possibility of human groupings based on interest and a common
creative impulse rather than on justice and a trade in help and
services; and I do not scruple therefore to put my heavy underline and
marginal note to M. Tarde's most intimate moment. A page or so further
on he is back below his ironical mask again, jesting at the "tribe of
sociologists"--the most unsociable of mankind. Thereafter jest,
picturesque suggestion, fantasy, philosophical whim, alternate in a
continuously delightful fashion to the end--but always with the gleam of
a definite intention coming and going within sight of the surface--and
one ends at last a half convinced Neo-troglodyte, invaded by a passion
of intellectual regret for the varied interests of that inaccessible
world and its irradiating love. The description of the development of
science, and particularly of troglodytic astronomy, robbed of its
material, is a delightful freak of intellectual fantasy, and the
philosophical dream of the slow concentration of human life into the
final form of a single culminating omniscient, and therefore a
completely retrospective and anticipatory being, a being that is, that
has cast aside the time garment, is one of these suggestions that have
at once something penetratingly plausible, and a sort of colossal and
absurd monstrosity. If I may be forgiven a personal intrusion at this
point, there is a singular parallelism between this foreshadowed Last
Man of M. Tarde's stalactitic philosopher, and a certain _Grand Lunar_ I
once wrote about in a book called "The First Men in the Moon". And I
remember coming upon the same idea in a book by Merejkowski, the title
of which I am now totally unable to recall.... But I will not write
further on this curiously attractive and deep seated suggestion. My
proper business here is, I think, chiefly to direct the reader past the
lightness and cheerful superficiality of the opening portions of this
book, and its--at the first blush, rather disappointing but critically
justifiable, treatment of the actual catastrophe, to these obscure but
curiously stimulating and interesting caves, and tunnels, and galleries
in which the elusive real thought of M. Tarde lurks--for those who care
to follow it up and seize it and understand.

H.G. WELLS.