The next section, Chapter XV, is, so far, the best of all. It deals with the development of the various forms of writing, and will be read with the greatest profit. It has all the qualities of Mr. Wells’s close précis writing at its best. Nor should the Author be blamed for having left out the theory (Sergi’s, if I remember right) that the alphabetic system had an origin of its own, connected neither with the Egyptian script nor with the Phœnician, but rather one from which the Phœnician itself derived. He has put the necessary facts simply and clearly and in the right order. He notes the reaction of writing on thought, and even (as in the case of China) upon social systems and method of government. And he has done well not to confuse so short a catalogue with too much consideration of learned theories. But even this first-rate chapter is somewhat marred by a conclusion based upon the false hypothesis of a perpetual change in human nature. Writing is made to play a part far too great in the creation of something like a new man. That is not, historically, what happens to Man through any of his own inventions. Man’s inventions do not change Man in essentials. Man remains Man throughout. And when Mr. Wells goes on to say that the very widespread use (and abuse) of printing to-day will create a further apocalyptic transformation of our poor minds, he is going right against the common experience of all cultivated men, and living in an unreal newspaper world of his own. The modern mind, in countries where this quite recent habit of promiscuous and universal reading has arisen, has not improved; it has visibly degenerated; it thinks less clearly, it has a less intelligent grip than had the more sparing readers of the past. You have only to contrast the peasant or fisherman to-day against the average newspaper-skimming townsman artisan, with an equal or higher material revenue, to appreciate this truth. In the popular appreciation of life and philosophy it is self-evident. The peasant is immeasurably superior. When, therefore, Mr. Wells concludes this admirable little section with the confident remark that “our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge,” he must be told that all that is mere Messianic stuff, part of a false religion, and worthless. It is the mood in which the same false Puritan religion from which he comes produced the Seventh Monarchy men, Second Adventists, Jump to Glory Jane, and the rest of them: the facile and contemptible mood of “The Good Time Coming” as an imaginary escape from this _Lachrymarum Vallis_: the “Great Rosy Dawn.”