Mr. Wells’s unfortunate disabilities for a task of this kind are primarily that he has not a sufficient acquaintance with the world, and that he has not supplemented this weakness—as it can in part be supplemented—by wide reading. He has not met many kinds of men nor compared many kinds of thought. He got coached, but he got coached too rapidly and too summarily. He knows little or nothing of the vast Catholic tradition and philosophy which inherits and explains not only Europe but the whole nature of Man. He seems to think that Catholic tradition and philosophy are a hole-and-corner affair, because, in the only society he has really known, Catholics form a very small and unfamiliar minority. He continually reaffirms what he happens to have read in the little popular textbooks of his youth up to about 1893–94. Over and over again one finds him saying things which passed for dogma in the popular science of thirty to forty years ago, and have since been quite done away with. He has also clearly been very slack in overlooking the work. He has not sufficiently superintended the illustration of his book, nor prevented absurd contradictions between graphic teaching by picture and the statements of the text. He falls into the common modern trick or error (I prefer to think it an error rather than a trick in this case, for he is a man, though limited, sincere) which I will baptize “the shoe-horn,” and with which I became wonderfully well acquainted at Oxford. It consists in putting a thing as a possibility on one page, as a probability on a later page, and on a still later page as a certitude. On page 48 he quotes a theory to which he “inclines,” viz. that Neanderthal man and true man did not interbreed. On page 52 it is no longer an “inclination” but a certitude. He says “there is no trace of it.” In exactly the same way on page 44 the Mediterranean area is, in the days of Early Man, “probably” a valley below sea-level. But on page 51 the submergence of the Mediterranean is taken for granted, till, on page 66, we get to the third stage in the “shoe-horn” process. It is by that page “practically certain” that at the end of the last Glacial Age the Mediterranean, not yet flooded from the Atlantic, was but a couple of land-locked basins.