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, psychic, chemical or biological, and
I do not think that he intended any particular fable beyond the
evident one that, physically, one species is as like to the next as
makes no matter. What Moreau did well another man might have done
better. It is a good story, and the adventures of the marooned
Prendick, alone, are sufficient justification for the original
conception. (I feel bound to note, however, the absurd comments of
some early reviewers who seemed to imagine that the story was a
defence of vivisection.)

The next romance (1897) seeks to answer the question: "What could a
man do if he were invisible?" Various attempts to answer that question
had been made by other writers, but none of them had come to it with
Mr Wells' practical grasp of the real problem; the earlier romantics
had not grappled with the necessity for clothes and the various ways
in which a material man, however indistinguishable his body by our
sense of sight, must leave traces of his passage. The study from
beginning to end is finely realistic; and even the theory of the
albino, Griffin, and in a lesser degree his method of winning the
useless gift of invisibility, are convincing enough to make us wonder
whether the thing is not scientifically possible. As a pure romance
set in perfectly natural surroundings, _The Invisible Man_ is possibly
the high-water mark of Mr Wells' achievement in this kind. He has
perfected his technique, and the interest in the development of the
story works up steadily to the splendid climax, when the form of the
berserker Griffin returns to visibility, his hands clenched, his eyes