Mr. Wells’s latest book, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, is a pedestrian effort, and to those who revel in his peculiar vein of imaginative prophecy it must come as a distinct anti-climax. Nevertheless, it is an important book, for it is based on the distilled essence of Mr, Wells’s thought during the whole of his career; one feels that it is the final revised edition of his opinions. Here is the bare skeleton of Wellsianism, stripped of everything that its author considered superfluous. The Fate of Homo Sapiens is probably the most topical of Mr. Wells’s books. He has ceased to look for the laws that govern the course of human history and to map prodigious cities of the future. The period of analysis is over, criteria have become fixed, and he now looks out on the world of to-day fully confident that he can both diagnose and cure.

The book is primarily an essay in sociology, an attempt by Mr. Wells to sum up the present state of man in the light of his own principles. It is as such that it must be judged. Some of the reviews in the Catholic press gave the impression that it was merely an attack on the Church; this overlooks the more positive elements of the book, which will probably come to be regarded as the official handbook of Wellsian thought.

Briefly, The Fate of Homo Sapiens is an outline of Mr. Wells’s social philosophy, together with a series of sketches showing how the modem world helps or hinders (usually hinders) the dawn of greater happiness for all.