| The author is writing about the scientists who are discussing this new “formula”: “Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of a gentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon the More Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to eminence—I do not clearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent, and that's all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was a voluminous work on Reaction Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (I write subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology, that did the thing for him.” “The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to what it has already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there is surely no exaggeration in the name. So, I shall continue to call it therefore throughout my story. But Mr. Bensington would no more have called it that in cold blood than he would have gone out from his flat in Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. The phrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it the Food of the Gods, in his enthusiasm and for an hour or so at the most altogether.” “Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts, kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants, and (until his wife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went out not at a regular pace, or, as he put it, so, but with bursts and intermissions of this sort.” “In a subsequent communication Redwood went further. He gave a perfect Brock's benefit of diagrams—exactly like rocket trajectories they were; and the gist of it—so far as it had any gist—was that the blood of puppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushrooms in what he called the ‘growing phase’ differed in the proportion of certain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were not particularly growing.” Well, H.G. Wells certainly knew something back then. In 1933, he wrote The Shape of Things to Come, a futuristic film about the post WWII era and the Freemasons are mentioned by name in the film. The movie, a favorite of mine when I was younger, might be very different than the book. The film portrays England after WWI and presents a United Airman organization called “Wings over the World,” which is really a United Nations of sorts, for the post WWII era. His other books and films, The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, along with The Shape of Things and Food of the Gods make H.G. Wells a time-honored sci-fi author and leave him in a class like no other. What Jules Verne started in the 19th century, H. G. Wells finished in the 20th century. |