The account of what used to be is just enough, and the account of what "is" does not strain the intelligence even of one who sees things from the point of view of 1914. The only unconvincing part of Mr. Wells's history is that which narrates how we ceased to be what we were and became what we are. He wipes the old world out with an atomic bomb, so destructive that it annihilates all the capitals of the earth, makes war impossible and compels mankind to federate. Mr. Wells has a penchant for "fishy" science. He knows a good deal about chemistry, biology, mechanics, and he knows that novel readers know less, as a rule, than he knows. So with the finest air of conviction he shatters the world with a new explosive, which has a kind of laboratory-veracity not claimed for the comet whose tail brushed us to revolution in an earlier of his engaging romances. The clever man secures plausibility by rather cheekily dedicating the book to "Frederick Soddy's interpretation of radium," to which this story "owes long passages." Neat, isn't it? It inspires in the ignorant reader a confidence that those atomic bombs are approved by the most advanced science--though, of course, Mr. Wells does not say so. The cataclysmic revolution is splendidly narrated, and is even better than Mr. Wells's earlier mechanical and astronomical romances. The trouble with it is that it is not a fitting transition from a state of society which is seriously conceived to a better state of society which is described with all the earnestness of a sociologist. The two things are discordant. If we are to be taken from one civilization to another we must move along a social highway. The atomic bombs are out of key with the prelude and the last two chapters.