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Although best known for his scientific romances that paved the way for the modern science fiction genre, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) produced significant works on politics, society, science and history. Fascinated as much with the real world as his imaginary one, and displeased with the quality of history textbooks at the end of World War I, Wells took on the task of writing his own book of world history. In 1919 he published The Outline of History, which he soon followed with the much shorter and highly popular work, A Short History of the World. This condensed work is a monumental account of the physical, spiritual, and intellectual evolution of the human race, and chronicles key events of humanitys development. More importantly, Wells brings to light the continuity of history, and provokes thoughts on the future implications of our scientific and intellectual progress. <p> This is a high quality book of the original classic edition. <p> This is a freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. <p> Enjoy this classic work. These few paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: <p> If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes? walking. <p>… All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter {4} nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off. <p>…If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene. <p>…And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time, the earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we live, until at last an age would come when, in the cooling air, steam would begin to condense into clouds, and the first rain would fall hissing upon the first rocks below. <p>…But as men began to discover and study the Record of the Rocks this belief gave place to the suspicion that many species had changed and developed slowly through the course of ages, and this again expanded into a belief in what is called Organic Evolution, a belief that all species of life upon earth, animal and vegetable alike, are descended by slow continuous processes of change from some very simple ancestral form of life, some almost structureless living substance, far back in the so-called Azoic seas. |
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