The Last Books of H.G. Wells

by HG Wells

  The notochord appears in the development of all vertebrated animals, but in all the higher forms it is invaded and superseded by cartilaginous or bony matter. It persists through life in the hag-fish and lampreys, and in the lamprey it comes to our tables.

  VII

  THE ANTAGONISM OF AGE AND YOUTH

  THE WRITER ACCEPTS these facts of nature with tranquillity and would not have them otherwise. But he does not believe that any young man, younger than thirty-five, let us say, as a maximum, will accept them in the same spirit. Until round and about that age every younger man is in conflict with the universe and seeks to have his will of it. He must be a very under-vitalised being indeed to be ready to give in and “take things as they are”.

  But the present writer is in his seventy-ninth year; he has lived cheerfully and abundantly. Like Landor he has warmed both hands at the fire of life and now as it sinks towards a meticulous invalidism, he is ready to depart. He awaits his end, watching mankind, still keen to find a helpful use for his accumulations of experience in this time of mental confusion, but without that headlong stress to come to conclusions with life, which is a necessary part of the make-up of any normal youngster, male or female.

  Every man over the formative years is in the same case as the writer. He made himself then. Since then he and all those other elder men have simply been working out and elaborating, with, in most cases, a certain ebb of intensity, the forms of thought into which they shaped their conviction. He is inclined to think that his continuing interest in biological science may have kept him in closer touch with living realities than is the case with politicians or money speculators or divines or busy business men, but that does nothing to bridge the gulf between an older man and the young. Hopefully or maliciously, jealously or generously, we old boys look on and cannot be anything better than lookers-on. We lived essentially, forty years odd ago. The young are life, and there is no hope but in them.

  VIII

  NEW LIGHT ON THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS

  THE ROTATION OF the earth and its annual circulation in its orbit is slowing down. All that has come to light in recent years stresses this idea that, measured by the precisions of the Radium Clock, our estimate of the duration of the early ages of the record of the rocks must undergo a quite immense reduction relative to the Cainozoic Period. The shapes remain the same but the proportions are different. That secular slowing down may or may not have been continuous. That it was seems the more probable thing to the writer. We do not know. The conditions of individual and specific survival seem to have fluctuated very rapidly and widely in those headlong times.

  One thing is certain. Not one fact has ever emerged, in a stupendous accumulation of facts, to throw a shadow of doubt upon what is still called the “Theory” of organic evolution. In spite of the vehement denials of the pious, no rational mind can question the invincible nature of the evolutionary case. There is an admirable little book by A. M. Davies, EVOLUTION AND ITS MODERN CRITICS, in which this case is fully and convincingly summarized. To that the ill-informed reader should go.

  What does appear now, is this fact of the slowing down of terrestrial vitality. The year, the days, grow longer; the human mind is active still but it pursues and contrives endings and death.

  The writer sees the world as a jaded world devoid of recuperative power. In the past he has liked to think that Man could pull out of his entanglements and start a new creative phase of human living. In the face of our universal inadequacy, the optimism has given place to a stoical cynicism. The old men behave for the most part meanly and disgustingly, and the young are spasmodic, foolish, and all too easily misled. Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive. The rest will not trouble about it, finding such opiates and consolations as they have a mind for. Let us then conclude this speculation about the final phase in the history of life, by surveying the modifications of the human type that are in progress to-day.

  The Primates appeared as forest creatures related to groups of the Insectivora. They commenced arboreal. They acquired quickness of eye and muscular adjustment among the branches. They were sociable and flourished wider. Then, as the usual increase in size, weight and strength occurred, they descended perforce to ground level, big enough now to outface, fight and outwit the larger carnivores of the forest world. Their semi-erect attitude enabled them to rear up and beat at their antagonists with sticks and stones, an unheard-of enhancement of tooth and claw. But presently their sociability diminished because they now needed wide areas of food supply. The little fellows faded out before the big fellows, according to the time-honoured pattern of life. The great apes developed the institution of the private family to a high level. Along this line they traveled to the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan of to-day.

  But outside forest regions during a phase of forest recession, the developing primates were exposed to other exactions. Grass plains and arid steppes spread out. The supply of vegetable food shrank. Small game and meat generally became an increasingly important part of the dietary. As ever there was the alternative: “Adapt or perish”. From a world-wide massacre of resistant primates a new series of forms had the good fortune to escape. They were more erect than the forest apes; they ran and hunted and they were sufficiently intelligent to co-operate in their hunting.

  These cursive ground apes were the Hominidæ, a hungry and ferocious animal series. Since they are open air animals with sufficient wits to avoid frequent drowning, the fossil traces of their appearance are few and far between. But they suffice. If they did not leave many bones, they littered the world with implements. The erect attitude had liberated hand and eye for a more accurate co-operation. These brutes communicated by uncouth sounds. They seized upon stakes and stones for their purposes. They hammered great stones into a sharper shape, and when the sparks flew into the dry leaves amidst which they squatted and the red flower of fire appeared, it appeared in a manner so mild and familiar to them that they were not dismayed. No other living creature hitherto had seen fire except in a catastrophic stampede of terrified animals. It pursued relentlessly. Bears, even cave bears, bolted headlong from fire and smoke. The Hominidæ on the contrary made a friend and a servant of fire. Attacked by cold or carnivorous enemies, they countered by creeping into caverns and suchlike sheltered places and keeping the home fires burning.

  So in the wintry phases of the successive glacial periods, these great quasi-human lout-beasts prevailed. With uncouth cries and gestures they hunted and killed. They were, in their adult form, much bigger and heavier than men. The clumsy hands that battered out the Chellean implements were bigger than any human hand. Skilled knappers can forge the relatively delicate implements of the later palaeolithic men with the utmost success, but the sham Chellean implement is as difficult as a subhuman eolith. The Chellean implement is the core of a great flint; the later human implement is a flake struck off from a core.

  The creature called Homo sapiens emerges from among the earlier Hominidæ very evidently, as another of those relapses of the life-cycle towards an infantile and biologically more flexible form, which have played so important a role in the chequered history of living things. He is not the equivalent of the clumsy adult Heidelberg or Neanderthal man. He is, in his opening phase, the experimental, playful, teachable, precocious child, still amenable to social subordination when already sexually adult. The ever changing conditions of life had less and less tolerance for a final gross overbearing adult phase, and it was cut out of the cycle. That primordial gross adult Homo disappears, and gives place to a more juvenile type, that much the record shows very plainly, but the phases and manner of the transition remain still open to speculation. All varieties of Homo sapiens interbreed, and there may have been a continuous interbreeding among the ear
lier species of the genus. Intervals of isolation may have produced Neanderthaloid, negroid, fair, dark, tall and short local variations still able to interbreed—in the same way that the dogs have produced endless races that can and will mongrelize when barriers break down. Families and tribes may have warred against each other and the victors have obliterated their distinctiveness by mating with captive women. Comparative anthropology slowly disentangles this story of the way in which the now unnecessary primordial adult Homo, for all effective purposes, faded out, leaving as his successor the childlike Homo sapiens, who is, at his best, curious, teachable and experimental from the cradle to the grave.

  These words “at his best” are the gist of this section. It is possible that there are wide variations in the mental adaptability of contemporary mankind. It is possible that the mass of contemporary mankind may not be as readily accessible to fresh ideas as the younger, more childish minds of earlier generations, and it is also possible that hard imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with the expansion and complication of human societies and organizations. That is the darkest shadow upon the hopes of mankind.

  But my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt, as I have said, that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  RUDY RUCKER grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Memorable volumes in his youthful readings were SEVEN SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF H.G. WELLS and Colin Wilson’s THE OUTSIDER, the two books setting him on his path to be a long-winded beatnik SF writer. Rucker has published twenty-nine books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. An early cyberpunk, he also writes SF in a realistic style that he characterizes as transreal. His most recent nonfiction book was about the meaning of computation: THE LIFEBOX, THE SEASHELL, AND THE SOUL. His latest novel is MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE, which gratifyingly includes the ouster of a corrupt and evil U. S. President. His latest story collection is MAD PROFESSOR. Having finally retired from his day-job as math and computer science professor, Rucker spends an inordinate amount of time writing and photographing for his blog www.rudyrucker.com/blog.

  COLIN WILSON has written over 100 books. At 24, he was hailed as a major existentialist thinker when his first success, THE OUTSIDER (1956) was published. But in his many books, Mr. Wilson has consistently revealed his contention that insight is achieved during moments of well-being, attained through effort and focus and that pessimism is what robs people of their vital energies. He lives on the Cornish coast in England.

  1 These can be found in the British Edition of THE LAST BOOKS OF H.G. WELLS published by the H.G. Wells Society.