Most ingeniously our author reports those projectiles, at first received with curiosity as matter for newspaper paragraphs, then with wonder and terror, growing to frantic panic when it appeared that, like the Trojan horse, they held hostile beings equipped with supermundane weapons and means of locomotion. The fate of Troy would be a mere squib beside the awful conflagration raised by such irresistible invaders, stalking across the country on their jointed stilts, picking up bank directors and baker's boys as we gather blackberries, trampling down the British army like ants, scorching up everything about them by an invisible heat-ray, and poisoning the landscape by fumes unknown to our chemistry, while all the artillery that can be hurried up for the defence of London has little more effect on them than pop-guns. Nervous readers may cry out at the gruesome incidents of page after page; but no one can deny the cleverness with which scientific imagination has been infused through the realistic details of this grim story. Its most marvellously simple device is that by which the triumphant giants are got off the stage. When London has been left empty to the flames, when the Thames is choked up by the monstrous and prolific red vegetation of Mars, when the whole population of Britain are in mad flight, and civilised humanity is trembling all over our earth at what seems its inevitable fate, the most experienced novel-reader cannot for the life of him guess what is to be the necessary _dénouement_ of deliverance; yet for overthrowing those Martian giants the author has in reserve means more ready and common than the pebbles of David's sling. Old poets, in such a case, had to provide their heroes with flying chariots, clouds of invisibility, interfering gods and the like; but all such machinery appears clumsy beside the everyday natural wonders familiar to a biologist. Of this tale, equally winged by imagination and knowledge, I will only say further that it were best read on a sunny bank of Surrey, by no means beside a guttering candle amid the creakings and scratchings of some lonely moated grange. At the opening of his chronicle, the narrator's supposed stand-point is Maybury Hill, looking down on the Woking railway line, which might be taken as an eastern boundary for the district now in view, if the commons did not straggle over the line to the edge of the Wey valley. Here lies, [Illustration: AN OLD FARM, NEAR LEITH HILL.]