carry them into the great mystery that lies behind the illusion of
this apparently obvious world.

We come, finally, without any suggestion of climax, to _The Food of
the Gods_ (1904). The food was produced, casually in the first
instance, by two experimenters who served no cause but that of their
own inquisitive science. One of them, Redwood, had become intrigued by
the fact that the growth of all living things proceeded with bursts
and intermissions; it was as if they had "to accumulate force to grow,
grew with vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space
before they could go on growing again." And Bensington, the other
experimenter, succeeded in separating a food that produced regular
instead of intermittent growth. It was universal in its effects,
influencing vegetable as well as animal life; and in the course of
twenty years it produced human giants, forty feet high. This is a
theme for Mr Wells to revel in, and he does, treating the detail of
the first two-thirds of the book with a fine realism. Like Bensington,
he saw, "behind the grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, the
coming world of giants and all the mighty things the future has in
store--vague and splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly
in the passing of a sunbeam far away." The parable is plain enough,
but the application of it weakens when we realise that so far as the
merely physical development goes, the food of the gods is only
bringing about a change of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent
bigness" must conquer the world, the final result is only humanity in
the same relation to life that it now occupies, and we are left to
reflect with Bensington, after the vision had faded, on "sinister
shadows, vast declivities and darknesses, inhospitable immensities,
cold, wild and terrible things."