Mr.-H. G. Wells delivered a striking lecture on Friday week
at the Royal Institution on the " Discovery of the Future," in which be boldly vindicated the assumption of the role of prophet by the serious man of science. Modern science bad in the past hundred years added an enormous vista to the pre-nineteenth-century outlook, and he contended that the opening up of this new inductive past afforded an indication of the way in which the searchlight of inference could be thrown forward into the future. As for the upsetting factor—the exceptional man—Mr. Wells boldly ranged himself with those who thought that the whole world of to-day would be very much the same as it is now if Napoleon had never been born. As regards the remote future, the crowning question--opened up by the publication of the " Origin of Species "—was,— What was to come after man ? For the nearer future he specified two changes as amounting to practical certainties,— one, that our dense populations were in the opening phase of a process of diffusion and aeration; the other that the mass of the white populations of the world would be forced up the scale of education and efficiency in the next two or three decades. Finally, Mr. Wells predicted that the changes of the twentieth would' dwarf even those of the nineteenth century, unparalleled as those had been. It is curious that in this forecast of enhanced efficiency Mr. Wells left out of consideration the possible results of the "Japanning " of China.
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