April 18th. 1937.

Dear H.G.

There is to be an exhibition of my cartoons at the London Gallery, 28 Cork Street, W.1. next month (as a kind of counterblast to the coronation). It seems that there is a convention that all such exhibitions must be 'opened' by some great person. Since you are the only one whom I should be really proud to have do it, I ask you - will you? The occasion calls for only your presence at the Gallery at o'clock on Thursday May 6th to proclaim more or less baldly to the world that the exhibition is open.

If the idea is objectionable to you please turn it down without hesitation. I shall be sympathetic but sorry, and the exhibition will have to open itself like a ripe tomato. But I hope that in any case you will be able to come along to see the works of Art one day.

Yours ever,

June 24th. 1941.

Dear H.G.

I am supposed to be on holiday, but I answer your letter. Am I mortified ! - to find myself in the bughouse with Otto, Franco, Strasser, Hess and a lot of cyphilitic Poles. Lumme, that must have been a "powerful" cartoon.

It was NOT an attack on YOU - unless your conscience identifies you (I never shbuld) with those who play at New World planning not for stimulus but for anodyne. Would you take another look at the cartoon ? It seems plain enough to me.

I am all for your Rights of Man and a Better World, as I shall blooming well show you in due course. What sensible man wouldn't be ? But I want it said loud and often that unless we fight like hell NOW against Hitler - much better than we have done so far - all such planes are boloney. Some say that that goes without saying, but it certainly does not. Boobs are already manufacturing a new beautiful let-out for themselves: "Gimme the New World now or what's the use of fighting at all.... might as well be run by Gobbels, etc., etc...."

I must say I whistle when you imply, after all you have written and said about Nazism, that you would as soon have Gobbele as the pre-war alleged democracy, imperfect and lousy as it was. I may be only a poor empty-headed cartoonist that some mysterious individual (with whiskers ?) has "got hold of", but that doesn't make sense to me. I hate to think of you behind barbed wire.

I refuse to be lost, H.G. Whatever happens, I persist in being your devoted if unwelcome admirer.

Yours ever,

Copy

13, Hanover Terrace,
Regent's Park,
N.W.1.

July 20th, 1942 (3?)

Dear Low,

Yours is an intoxicating letter and suggestion.
I'd love you to do it. It might be possible for you to publish
it as a little booklet and we might be able to get trans-
lations interleaved. Then for propaganda purposes we could
have it enlarged into posters that would decorate mess rooms
etc.

I'm getting stronger every day but I've been in
this house continuously since Jan. 4th. I'm dying for a
change. I'm going on Friday 24th to the Bridge Hotel,
Wheatley, Oxon, telephone TOL Wheatley 50. Bodily I get
better day by day, but I find I'm seriously irritated by
platitudes about the war and that I have phases of mental
black-out - when I forget people's names - pure fatigue. At
Wheatley I shan't think of anything except the people about
there. I shall be near Great H ... and the M .... (?)
family and I know all the absurd people in the village
and ... absurd in a nice way. Given decent
weather I shall come back to London sane - leastways I hope so.

Bless you and Madeline and all of you.

H.G.

THE INSIDER'S WORLD

A gift subscription to KEN has been entered in your name by

whom we join in hoping that you will enjoy the unique contents of this magazine. You will receive your first copy shortly.

KEN . . . 919 NORTH MICHIGAN AVE., CHICAGO, ILL.

205.

DE GAULLE FOR THE LITTLE ONES.

I must confess to a certain prejudice against de Gaullism, but happily in this review my prejudices can be disregarded. I am reviewing a book obviously published with General de Gaulle's knowledge and consent. It is a book I urge every curious reader to get and keep. I want to promote its sale. I want to help it in every possible way.

I have a profound and affectionate admiration for France, the France of the great revolution, and for the exemplary lucidity of the French mind at its best. I dislike imperialist and reactionary nationalist France. I find the best analysis of the French malaise in the works of Anatole France which I have recently re-read from start to finish. How fine-spirited they are! The military training at St Cyr is alien to French civilised instincts. It has imposed a class of narrow-minded and out of date officers, ruthlessly competitive among themselves and quite heedless of their country's role in the reconstruction of

* Général de Gaulle, Chef des Français Combattants, par Nash. Hachette, London.

human affairs. The military inefficiency of the British at the outset of the present war was due largely to the *a similar* fame out of date/professionalism. The French people have not had the British opportunities for a frank criticism of their situation, and the world is perplexed by the violent, egotistical struggles of the French generals and admirals to usurp the control of a gagged people.

For reasons that remain obscure, the British authorities have put their money - or, speaking as a taxpayer, *my* money - on de Gaulle - very plentifully. The amount available has secured the prompt adherence of the Communist Party to his claims. Until the present book came to hand, I was disposed to resent this expenditure. But here I have got something in return. I have laughed. I have rarely read a more *amusing* absurd book. It should prove the political suicide of our official protégé.

It is printed in black, red, blue, green and yellow, and on the cover we see de Gaulle (and no other St Cyr man), in a cloak of heroic magnificence, mounted, not on a 1938 tank as one might have expected, but on a red spotted horse with a green mane, leading the marshalled forces of France.

207.

They carry the tricolour, but exalted above it is the double cross of Lorraine, recalling the France of Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, and a long history of feuds, murders and treacheries that men once hoped had been ended by the Revolution for ever.

The pictures begin with de Gaulle already recognisable as a little boy - an only child apparently, though I am told he has brothers - listening on the hearthrug to the stories of a venerable grandfather and a middle-aged father of the previous invasions of France, "belle, fertile et paisible". To endorse the "paisible" quality, the toys on the hearthrug are soldiers and a cannon. At school our hero is instructed by his father, who has come to Paris as a teacher, and whose patriotic bias is indicated by a large map of La France behind him. Next we see de Gaulle, a tall exemplary figure standing alone before the instructor's blackboard at St Cyr, where he learnt all that was necessary to become "un officier accompli". Then on August 4th, 1914, still solo, he departs for the front amidst great popular enthusiasm. The other St Cyr men were I suppose hanging back.

208.

We see him wounded and on a stretcher. (No other wounded in sight.) He is displayed rallying his men to a counter-attack and "grièvement blessé" by an "obus de gros calibre" - it had to be "gros" - on the stricken field. Consequently the rally fails. He is picked up by a German ambulance and taken off to Germany. All this is told as if nothing of the sort had ever happened to any other human being. Five times, says the narrator, he tried to escape and failed. One infers there must have been something defective in his tactics; probably he tried to do it alone and his natural exhibitionism betrayed him.

**Five times!** We have this word to prove it.

He is next seen writing his ideas about modern warfare. Sublimely alone as ever, he consults nobody about it. He works with the door wide open, and a cunning German stands in the doorway behind him and at a distance of several yards snapshots his thoughts. There was no necessity to do that. His belated ideas were easily accessible to the Germans if they wanted them without this brain photography. How belated they were the student need only consult Mr Ivor Halstead's **Truth about our Tanks** to realise.

209.

On his return to France, "he wished to transmit to the younger generation" the experience he had acquired "sur le champ de bataille" - not to mention Germany again - and he was nominated Professor of Military History at St Cyr.

The young reader is given a picture of him; all alone on a platform, handing on that fatal St Cyr tradition to the generation of French officers which collapsed so disastrously in '39 - '40. In '39 the little innocents are told that the sole gleam of resistance to the invaders was made by de Gaulle. The Battle of Britain and a few other such checks to the German triumph are entirely ignored. He got away to London, where he took complete control of everything. We are shown the magnificent effect of his proclamations upon the French common people. Everything in the way of sabotage the French did, we are told, was done by "La France combattante, sous l'étendard tricolore & Croix de Lorraine". Otherwise presumably they would have done nothing. His boats patrolled the oceans and sank hostile submarines. "Ses avions protègent les convois britanniques" and bombard German towns. To which we poor English gagged under his orders may only exclaim "Well!" Finally we see the de Gaullists in North Africa "déjouant complètement les plans de Rommel", with no acknowledgment to any British or American cooperation, and with that, this most informative picture book concludes. Get it, I repeat, get it before it goes out of print.

210.

This is the nationalist bunkum upon which a new gener-
ation of French children are to be trained for the great day
of the de Gaullist plebiscite. Frankly I think that plebiscite
game which Napoleon the Third brought off and Boulanger
didn't, is half a century out of date. I make no suggestion
that de Gaulle is not sincere. He is, I think, an artlessly
sincere megalomaniac. I am convinced he believes in himself
to such an extent that he feels justified in any measure that
will put him in solitary control of France and the world.
Across one's mind there drifts a voice out of Kenneth
Grahame's immortal *Wind in the Willows*, chanting in an
ecstasy of self approval: -

"The learned men at Oxford know all that there is to be
known,
They don't know half as much as wonderful Mr. de Gaulle."

It may be that in making reaction hopelessly ridiculous,
he has done something worth the money he has cost me.

On the whole, though, I find him expensive and I would
rather have it spent upon the sort of Frenchmen who have had
nothing to do with de Gaulle or anything else from that
reactionary hot-house of St Cyr.

(Reprinted from NATURE, Vol. 158, page 399, September 21, 1946.)

H. G. WELLS: A SURVEY
AND TRIBUTE

By SIR RICHARD GREGORY, BART., F.R.S.

CREATIVE ideas, and the influence of their expression, constitute a measure of material and intellectual advance displayed in the works of science and literature. Science is now commonly understood to be systematic and formulated natural philosophy; but with achievements in these fields of human understanding are also associated moral and social forces which, though not of a physical kind, are observable in their effects and admit of rational analysis and judgment.

This is the domain of what Wells defined as human ecology; and all his works—novels, fantastic and imaginative romances and books upon social, religious and political questions—are concerned, directly and indirectly, with individual and social factors involved in the biological whole. As a philosophy of matter, life and mind and their relationships to one another, he may be said to have expressed independently much the same evolutionary principles in diverse ways as those presented by General Smuts in his "Holism and Evolution", published in 1926. Moral as well as material values enter into this new humanism, and the adaptation of them to worthy conditions of life must continually create new problems for civilized societies to face and to solve, the tendency always being towards integrations of increased complexity and therefore of increasing difficulty of adjustment.

This was consistently the attitude taken by Wells towards human thought and action. In a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in 1902, on the "Discovery of the Future", his thesis was "that mankind was at the dawn of a great change-over from life regarded as a system of consequences to life regarded as a system of constructive effort. . . . We should be less and less bound by the engagements of the past and more and more ruled by a realization of the creative effect of our acts". He did not say that the future could be foretold, but he held that its conditions could be foretold.

Thirty-four years later, in another Discourse at the Royal Institution, Wells again expressed what was always dominant in his mind—to relate effects to causes and arrive at generalizations and syntheses. His temperament and endeavour were those of a scientific inquirer into individual experiences and their collective relationships, with the same independence of customary authority as that of the Horatian motto *Nullius in verba* of the Royal Society, but with much greater perplexities to study than those of the concrete natural sciences. The subject of the Discourse at the Royal Institution was “The Idea of a World Encyclopedia”, and the object was the collation of all published knowledge in the world by, with and for the world.

The consensus of such a vast undertaking can be found in Wells's "Outline of History", "The Science of Life", with his eldest son, G. P. Wells, and Julian Huxley as joint authors, and "The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind", successively published from 1920 to 1932. The "Outline" is a story of the earth as the abode of man from his earliest appearance on the planet to the Peace of Versailles; the "Life" deals with biology and social structures; and "Work" with ways in which humanity earns its living. As contributions to the history of man and his activities, these three works constitute a supreme achievement which could not have been conceived and constructed by any historian without his scientific credentials. He was as aware as anyone of certain weaknesses and deficiencies; but he welcomed suggestions to remedy them as well as to include new discoveries relating to human evolution and history, particularly in revised editions of the "Outline".

To have mastered such a vast body of human thought and action, and to have kept abreast, as Wells did, of current knowledge and opinion on many technical subjects, was an intellectual feat which no other modern man of letters could possibly have achieved. Referring to these historical surveys and attempts to bring economic, financial and social life into rational relationship, he said at the Royal Institution ten years ago that he had been engaged in the "still more desperate struggle to estimate the possible consequences of this or that set of operating causes upon the future of mankind". His imaginative romances, as well as his works on social, religious and political questions, reflect his reactions to historical

2

or visionary influences upon modes of human existence. On the magic carpet of his mind he could travel backward or forward in time and space and live in ideals so vividly that they became convincing realities in narrative.

The first scientific fantasy of this kind was "The Time Machine", a rough draft of which appeared in the *Science Schools Journal* when Wells was a young man of twenty-one years. He had acquired a sound knowledge of the fundamental facts of astronomy and was able, therefore, to describe accurately the rapidly changing celestial scenes presented to the time traveller. The moon passed in an instant through all its phases, the sun became a band of fire and swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice again in a minute or less, with spring and winter merging into one another in the picture. Wells knew, better than any other man of letters, what such natural events and processes had been and that they were due to forces acting continually and uniformly. It was this scientific knowledge, combined with brilliant powers of expression, that made him unique in his own particular field.

After "The Time Machine" came "The War of the Worlds" as the second of a series of a dozen imaginative romances in which physical and biological factors were cleverly used. Lowell's work on the planet Mars, and his conclusions that the so-called canals had been artificially constructed by intelligent beings, had been published three years earlier, so Wells had a good basis for his story. The Martians he conceived to invade the earth brought novel heat-rays and a heavy gas with them as devastating means of conquest, but after a short time they themselves became masses of corruption due to insidious germs of disease which they had eliminated in their own planet and to which their bodies were, therefore, not immune. This end of the Martian invaders is a characteristic example of the application of scientific knowledge to forms and conditions of life woven into a story having also strong emotional appeal.

"The First Men in the Moon", published in 1901, again revealed his genius for producing a story rich in human interest without disturbing the sensibilities of critical scientific minds. In this respect, Wells's novel was far in advance of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Moon", which had many scientific blunders and inconsistencies. Moreover, Verne's travellers did

3

not reach the moon, whereas Wells's landed upon our
satellite and round beings living inside it with
thoughts and feelings which made contacts with
human hearts.

So it was with the story "In the Days of the
Comet", published in 1906. Several years earlier a
remarkable new star appeared, visible to the naked
eye, and expanding at such a rate that it was thought
by many people to be a minor planet approaching
the earth. Wells had a much better basis for his
fancy when he made a comet cross the earth's orbit
at a point near enough for us to pass through its tail,
as actually happened in 1861. He let his imagination
play with the idea that human nature might be
changed by the introduction of a new spiritual
element in the earth's atmosphere, represented by a
peculiar greenish radiation from his comet's tail.
After passing through the tail, the whole race was
transfigured. Jealousy and hatred vanished, and
with it war and poverty, in the vision of a world
lifted out of acquisitive greed into a condition of
celestial harmony. This poetic dream of what man-
kind might become by following paths of truth and
righteousness and suppressing animal instincts is
displayed in a number of Wells's works, often with
hope but always conscious of the prevalence of evil
tendencies in human nature.

In "The World Set Free", the transformation from
old to new and better conditions of life and govern-
ment was reached not through the swish of a comet's
tail but as the result of a world war. The book was
published early in 1914, but in substance and out-
look it describes the Second World War even more
closely than the First. The book was dedicated to
Prof. Soddy's "Interpretation of Radium", published
in 1909; and the theme is that of the disintegration
of the atom and the use of 'atomic bombs' and
thousands of aeroplanes in modern warfare. As a
story of the discovery and use of natural power to
supplement man's animal strength, the first chapter
of the book, entitled "The Sun Snarers", states these
developments with crystal clearness. It outlines the
conquest of external power in the industrial applica-
tions of fire, steam, electricity, and new chemical
elements, leading up to radium and the release of the
energy locked up in atoms, for use first with devas-
tating effects in what was called "The Last War" and
then, in 1956, to liberate the race from obsessions and

4

entanglements which impede moral and material
growth.

"Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the old way of living and the new were intense" are words used in the last chapter to introduce the assembly summoned to place social organisation upon a new and nobler footing. This council was constituted in the spirit of the United Nations Organisation, and it eventually led to the planning of a new common social order for the entire population of the earth. How close the realities will approach to Wells's ideals remains to be seen.

Other works in which the possible future of the
human race was forecast are "The Sleeper Awakes"
(1899), "Anticipations" (1901), "Mankind in the
Making" (1903), "The Food of the Gods" (1904), and
"A Modern Utopia" (1905). Of "Anticipations" Sir
Ray Lankester said, in a five-column review in
*Nature* of March 13, 1902:

"This is a profoundly interesting and suggestive
book by a very remarkable man. Mr. Wells was
educated at the Royal College of Science; he has a
thorough knowledge of, and considerable training in,
the great branches of science—physics, chemistry,
astronomy, geology and biology. This course of
study operated, in the case of Mr. Wells, upon a
mind naturally gifted with an extraordinarily vivid
imagination and the aptitude for true literary art."

This kind of encouragement from scientific friends
was highly appreciated by Wells from the very
beginning of his literary career to the end of his life.
He was trained to become a science teacher, and
during this formative period, as well as for several
years later, his closest contacts were with workers in
scientific fields. He knew that when he entered the
world of letters, in which he afterwards attained
international fame, he lost his place on the ladder on
which he had been moving upward; but the fact
that he continued to be regarded as a great scientific
educator by leaders of his own generation, and an
inspiration to the new, kept him continually in touch
with advancing knowledge and contributed in no
small measure to the remarkable responses repre-
sented in his works.

"Anticipations" projected the present into the
future from the outlook tower of modern science.
It was an indictment of many existing customs and
structures and a prophecy of what changes might be

5

expected in the near future. On the mechanical or
inventive side, the predictions made in the book
revealed an insight which was truly marvellous.
Motor-cars and motor-roads were largely to replace
railway traffic. Land ironclads, armoured trains,
armoured tortoises or tanks and flying machines
with folded parachutes for escape were to be used in
warfare. Forty years after this forecast all these
machines were in action, but their development has
not been accompanied by the changes of heart and
social structures which Wells hoped for but had not
the same scientific reasons to expect to be fulfilled.

In "A Modern Utopia" (1905), faith in the prin-
ciples of a rational social biology is expressed in
practical terms with hope as well as ingenuity. The
system presented resembles that of the Platonic
Republic, save that insistence is given to the precious-
ness of individual freedom and to toleration. Family
allowances were to be made to women, but criminals
and certain other groups were not to be allowed to
reproduce their kind, though they were free to follow
their own proclivities in their own separate com-
munities. The main idea was to keep learning and
the applications of it progressive instead of fixed and
pedantic, the spirit being, therefore, that of "The
Discovery of the Future". This kind of idealistic
Utopia is found again in "Men Like Gods" (1923).
It makes man the master of his own house and
conceives the birth of a new race with noble qualities
of mind and great physical strength, devoted to the
understanding of Nature in all its aspects and its
control for the progressive welfare of humanity.

Such projections as these into the future of man
and society are not satires like Swift's "Gulliver's
Travels" and Samuel Butler's "Erewhon", or
parodies of science found in novels of our own times.
They rank with Plato's "Republic", Thomas More's
"Utopia" and William Morris's "News from No-
where" in their social philosophy and as vivid
literature. The world of science has every reason to
be proud that its spirit and service should have been
translated so genuinely and loyally into "Thoughts
that breathe and words that burn" with such unsur-
passing power and influence as those possessed by
Wells. He presented scientific workers to his readers
as human beings and not as the travesties in which
they figure in novels and romances written without
his intimate knowledge of them and their impulses.

6

That is why homage has always been gratefully paid
to him in these columns and in other scientific
periodicals.

"By science," Wells once said, "is meant a process
of human intellectual energy which is exhaustively
and reverently criticized, leading, it is hoped, to
action exhaustively criticized before it is exhaustively
planned." In these words he expressed the whole of
his faith, the whole of his belief in human life. How
and why he acquired this faith and proclaimed it is
comprehensively stated in the two volumes of his
"Experiment in Autography" (1934), the sub-title of
which reads "Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very
Ordinary Man". He looked at people and their
actions against a background of knowledge never
used before to paint pictures of aspects of individual
and social life; and his insight as well as the breadth
of his experiences made all the scenes and figures
stand out with convincing reality, even when they
were fanciful.

From first to last the characters in all Wells's
works represent growing experiences and the responses
of thought to them. Following scientific methods, he
observed ways and means of life independently,
described faithfully what he saw and deduced prin-
ciples from this evidence. "Love and Mr. Lewisham",
"Kipps", "Mr. Polly", and "The Wheels of Chance"
are stories in which he himself lived and struggled
and thought. So it was with most of his other novels.
When he left this field for that of scientific romances,
literary critics deplored the change of front and his
re-entry into a field in which he became the supreme
interpreter.

Mention has already been made of the lines of
these perspectives of space and time, and of some
other adventures into the domain of human ecology.
It is sufficient here to refer, in addition, to "The
World of William Clissold", three volumes (1926),
"The Way the World is Going" (1928), "The Open
Conspiracy" (1930), "After Democracy" (1933), "The
Anatomy of Frustration" (1936), "Star Begotten"
(1937), in which the idea is used that cosmic rays
directed towards the earth might induce mutation of
genes in human nuclei, "The Fate of Homo Sapiens"
(1939), "The New World Order" (1940), "The Out-
look for Homo Sapiens", and "The Conquest of
Time" and "Phoenix" (both in 1942), "'42, '43, '44 :
The Happy Turning", which is a supplement to the

7

"Autobiography", and "Mind at the End of its Tether" (1945).

These, with other books already noted, comprise only a selected list of Wells's contributions to the study of social biology. They state the essential ideas of his life and draw the perspective of a world liberated from sectionalism, with men and women of goodwill and wide outlook co-operating in the task of constructing and maintaining conditions and ways of life worthy of human powers and the availability of the natural resources of the universe.

In "Ann Veronica" (1909)—a novel which provoked a storm of indignation from a group of critics, because of its frank discussion of sex relationships—Wells makes one of the characters say: "Find the thing you want to do intensely, make sure that's it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good: if you die, well and good. Your purpose is done." Before he wrote these words, Wells had had several reminders that his physical system was weak in several parts and liable to breakdowns. It was his indomitable spirit that urged him on to carry out his purpose for a much longer period than anyone who knew him when he began his literary career would have expected. This was maintained to the day of his death on August 13. A few weeks before his heart ceased to beat, he had planned to work hard at the scenario of a film to be "The Shape of Things to Come" brought up to date with the new ideas and curiosities due to the popularization of the principles of the nuclear disintegration of the atom and the manufacture of the atomic bomb.

To have had such an intention at seventy-nine years of age and after producing about a hundred notable volumes is an impressive example of the mental alertness and perseverance of purpose of Wells's life, the spirit of which remains in his works to enlighten the world for many generations. From his early days he was eager to learn and to master his circumstances. His father was a small tradesman at Bromley, Kent, where Herbert George Wells (familiarly known as "H.G.") was born on September 21, 1866. His mother was a typical representative of the lower middle class of Victorian times, with fixed regard for the established order and its conventions. This led to Wells being sent to a local 'academy' as a child instead of going to a national school.

With the same maternal desire that Wells should

8

occupy a 'respectable' place in the social order, he was twice placed in drapery establishments, from both of which he came away with resentment at the life imposed upon him. Between these two experiences he was sent for a month's trial as an apprentice to a pharmaceutical chemist at Midhurst, Sussex; but this new start in life was abandoned for financial reasons. He began there, however, the study of Latin with lessons from the headmaster of the small grammar school, at which he became a boarder for a couple of months in the interim between the two drapery adventures. After breaking away from the second of these trials, he wrote to this headmaster, who, as the result, offered him a post as an usher in the Preparatory Department of Midhurst Grammar School.

It was at this place and under this influence that Wells made his first systematic acquaintance with modern science. There he attended evening classes under the Science and Art Department, and was so successful in gaining grant-earning certificates in a number of subjects that in 1884 he was accepted as a science teacher in training at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington, which later became the Royal College of Science.

After three years at the College, Wells left without being awarded the associateship, having failed in the examination in advanced geology. Even without this qualification he was able to obtain a post in a small private school in Wales, where he had his left kidney crushed during a football game and was wrongly pronounced to be consumptive, but later to be diabetic, which proved to be true. In 1889 he became an assistant master in a private school at Kilburn, where Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) had been a pupil, and Wells taught mathematics and science to a class which included A. A. Milne, the novelist and playwright, son of the headmaster of the school.

While at this Henley House School, Wells passed the London Intermediate B.Sc. examination with honours in zoology and was awarded the licentiate-ship of the College of Preceptors with the three prizes in theory and practice of education, mathematics and natural science. These successes led to the offer of a post on the staff of the University Tutorial College, where he went to teach biology and also geology to students at Red Lion Square working for the Univer-

9

sity of London examinations. While there he took
his B.Sc. degree in 1890 with first-class honours in
zoology and was first in the second class in honours
in geology. He also obtained the fellowship diploma
of the College of Preceptors with honours in two
subjects and gained the Doreck Scholarship for
theory and practice of education, thus getting in
front of university teachers in their own examination.

His career as a professional teacher came to an end
in 1893 with another breakdown of health. It was
then that he began to earn his living by writing
articles for the periodical press on common subjects
in his own whimsical vein of reactions to them. His
“Select Conversations with an Uncle” (1895) is a
collection of such contributions from scores of other
unsigned articles and tales. He also contributed a
number of reviews to *Nature*, including one on
Podmore’s “Apparitions and Thought Transference”.
His first book was, however, Part 1 of a “Text-book
of Zoology” (1893), with an introduction by G. B.
Howes, assistant professor of zoology at the Royal
College of Science, followed two years later by Part II,
and Gregory and Wells’s “Honours Physiography”.
In the same year (1895) “The Time Machine” was
published, and Wells found himself recognized, at
twenty-nine years of age, as a bright star rising above
the horizon of the world of letters to radiate a new
penetrating light before men.

The honorary degree of D.Lit. was conferred upon
Wells by the University of London in 1936; and in
1943 he was awarded the D.Sc. degree for a thesis on
“The Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of the
Individual Life in the Higher Metazoa, with Par-
ticular Reference to Homo sapiens”. He was presi-
dent of the Educational Science Section of the British
Association at the Nottingham meeting in 1937,
when he gave an address on “The Informative Con-
tent of Education”, which led to the publication of
two reports upon the subject by a research com-
mittee of the Association. He was elected an honorary
fellow of the Imperial College of Science and Tech-
nology in 1943, just fifty years after the publication
of “The Time Machine”, the first of the imposing
series of works by which Wells became the greatest
international scientific educator of his times.

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