The Redeveloped Basement: Wells and Habitat

Abstract

Wells learned from biology that habitat is life’s great shaper. Evolution showed him how environment moulded species by its gradual pressures. Fossils stamped upon his mind the fact that failure to fit in must bring annihilation—‘The long roll of palaeontology’, his essay ‘On Extinction’ says, ‘is half filled with the records of extermination.’ Anatomy supplied living proof of the power of environment—A Short History of the World points out that man’s body still pays homage to its watery origins: ‘his lung surfaces’, for instance, ‘must be moist in order that air may pass through them into his blood’. In Guide to the New World, Wells stresses that ‘down the whole corridor of recorded history, man has been made’ What has made him is his habitat: and this concept is significant to Wells not only as regards the past but also the future. Looking ahead to this in book after book, he urges that man, previously shaped by environment, must now start to shape environment to his own advantage. The necessity for this was not only impressed on him by a training in biology. It was first brought home by the surroundings of his formative years.