• Various gifted predicters of the atom bomb have been
cited and quoted in the last few days, notably Mr. H. G. Wells. I have been in touch with Mr. Wells, who is, unfortunately, ill, but still capable, as his letter to me testifies, of writing good vigorous English. Various passages in his romances have been referred to, but he himself recalls one of the very earliest of his writings—an essay called "The Extinction of Man," which appeared in the old Pall Mall Gazette as long ago as 1894, and was included a few years later in an almost unobtainable volume called Certain Personal Matters. But it is only the possible effects of some new discovery, not the dis- covery itself, that are there discussed ; indeed, what his mind was running on was some new disease, a plague that would carry off not 20 or 3o per cent. of the inhabitants of the globe, as in the past, but the entire hundred. But if the cause is different, the conse- quences would not be. " Even now, for all we can tell, the coming terror may be crouching for its spring, and the fall of humanity be at hand. In the case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, the hour of its complete ascendancy has been the eve of its entire overthrow." Annihilation, whether by pestilence or by bomb, is a sobering theme for reflection. And general annihila- tion has come very near to being a practical possibility.
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