mable privilege of learning how it came about. His
temperament was something too childlike--without the child's
brutality--to investigate the enormous complexities of adjustment that
had brought about the conditions into which he was all too suddenly
plunged by a charge of duck-shot. He came and was filled with an
inalterable perplexity, but some of his questions were too ingenuous;
and while we may sympathise with the awful inertia of Hilyer before
the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable differences between
mortal precept and mortal practice, we feel that we might, in some
cases at least, have made a more determined effort. We might have
found some justification for chairs, by way of instance, and
certainly an excuse for raising beds above the floor. But the wounded
angel, like the metal machine, is only a device whereby the searching
examination of our author may be displayed in an engrossing and
intimate form. And in _The Wonderful Visit_, that exuberance we
postulated, that absorption in the development of idea, is more
marked; in the unfolding of the story we can trace the method of the
novelist.

Indeed, the three romances that follow discover hardly a trace of the
social investigator. _The Island of Dr Moreau_, _The Invisible Man_
and _The War of the Worlds_ are essays in pure fantasy, and although
the first of the three is influenced by biology I class it
unhesitatingly among the works of sheer exuberance. Each of these
books is, in effect, an answer to some rather whimsical question, and
the problem that Dr Moreau attempted to solve was: "Can we, by
surgery, so accelerate the evolutionary process as to make man out of
a beast in a few days or weeks?" And within limits he found that the
answer was: "Yes."

In the seclusion of his island, and with the poor assistance of the
outlawed medical student, Montgomery, Dr Moreau succeeded in producing
some creditable parodies of humanity by his operations on pigs, bulls,
dogs and other animals. These cut and remoulded creatures had
something the appearance and intelligence of Homo Sapiens, and could
be maintained at that level by the exercise of discipline and the
constant recital of "the Law"; left to themselves they gradually
reverted to the habits and manners of the individual beasts out of
which they had been carved. We may infer that some subtle organic
chemistry worked its determination upon their uncontrolled wills, but
Mr Wells offers no explanation