Apart from his general lucid and vigorous presentation of a long period very difficult to summarize, there is an excellent metaphor upon page 396 comparing the fragmentary cohesion of society in the Dark Ages, and the gradual formation of feudalism in their most disturbed period, to the physical formation of crystals. The author is naturally a little confused about his general dates, because he has not had occasion to read History seriously. Thus he strangely considers the _Fourth_ and _Fifth(!)_ centuries to have been particularly chaotic in territorial arrangement, and immediately afterwards uses the term “Feudalism.” That is, of course, a complete misunderstanding of comparative dates and a misapprehension of the length of the period and the great changes which took place in such a length. In the _Fourth_ century the Western world was entirely united and ordered from Rome, though there was the usual heavy local fighting and difficulty in guarding the frontiers from irruption. In the _Fifth_ century there were armed bands raiding across the frontiers in not very large numbers, and accepted as soldiers of the Empire, one very bad Asiatic invasion _en masse_, which was beaten, and, at the end, the disassociation of the Western part of the Empire into separate vast regional governments under local generals. _Feudalism_ was an altogether later thing; as much later as _we_ are later than the Wars of the Roses. It was a thing which became established in the _Ninth_ century, though you can already see it forming (unconsciously) in the _Eighth_. It was the break-up of society into a mass of local governments, very unsystematic and held together only by personal bond of overlord and vassal. To talk of it in connection with the _Fourth_ and _Fifth_ centuries is like talking of industrial capitalism in the same breath with the peasants’ revolt of 1381. Nevertheless, though the centuries are wildly wrong, the metaphor of crystals as applied to feudal groupment and regroupment is very good, and is an excellent example of Mr. Wells’s powers of analogy and illustration. I should not quarrel either in this commentary upon Mr. Wells’s general acceptance of the old-fashioned History which is still conventional in most of our official teaching here in England, although it is already badly out of date. Were I writing a commentary upon the book treated seriously as an essay on European history, I should be more severe upon this simple acceptation of stuff on which most of our students are still fed, but which, in the light of modern scholarship, especially of French scholarship, has the effect of Crinolines and Pegtop Trousers.