literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing,
the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of
the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural
selection." Mr Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so
nearly adapted to their environment that the need for struggle, with
its corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically
ceased. Humanity had become differentiated into two races, both
recessive; one, the Eloi, a race of childlike, simple, delicate
creatures living on the surface of a kindly earth; the other, the
Morlocks, a more active but debased race, of bestial habits, who lived
underground and preyed cannibalistically on the surface-dwellers whom
they helped to preserve, as a man may preserve game. The Eloi,
according to the hypothesis of the Time Traveller, are the descendants
of the leisured classes; the Morlocks of the workers. "The Eloi, like
the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They
still possessed the earth on sufferance; since the Morlocks,
subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the
day-lit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I
inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs perhaps through
the survival of an old habit of service." All this is in the year
802,701 A.D.

The prophecy is less convincing than the wonderful sight of the
declining earth some million years later, sinking slowly into the
dying fires of the worn-out sun. Man and the vertebrates have
disappeared, and the highest wonder of animal life is represented by
giant crustaceans, which in turn give way to a lower form. We have a
vision of an involution that shall succeed the highest curve of
development; of life ending where it began in the depths of the sea,
as the initial energy of the solar system is dissipated and the