The Treasury of the Fantastic by David Sandner & Jacob Weisman & Peter S. Beagle

Author:David Sandner & Jacob Weisman & Peter S. Beagle [Sandner, David & Weisman, Jacob & Beagle, Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616960964
Amazon: 1616960965
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2013-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

H. G. WELLS

A Moth: Genus Unknown

H. G. Wells (Herbert George, 1866–1946) was an English writer trained in the sciences, who wrote many types of books—novels, history, social commentary, political writings, and textbooks, such as The Outline of History in three volumes. Although Wells seemed to single-handedly invent science fiction, calling his novels “scientific romances,” he wrote very little fantasy. His most famous novels include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The First Man on the Moon, and The Invisible Man.

Wells’s “A Moth: Genus Unknown” (a.k.a. “The Moth: Genus Novo”) was first published in the March 28, 1895 edition of Pall Mall Gazette and collected in The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, also published in 1895. The story included false footnotes and was written with an air of scientific examination that is nevertheless more horrorlike than science fictional.

Probably you have heard of Hapley—not W. T. Hapley, the son, but the celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of Periplaneta Hapliia, Hapley the entomologist.

If so you know at least of the great feud between Hapley and Professor Pawkins, though certain of its consequences may be new to you. For those who have not, a word or two of explanation is necessary, which the idle reader may go over with a glancing eye, if his indolence so incline him.

It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really important matters as this Hapley-Pawkins feud. Those epoch-making controversies, again, that have convulsed the Geological Society are, I verily believe, almost entirely unknown outside the fellowship of that body. I have heard men of fair general education even refer to the great scenes at these meetings as vestry-meeting squabbles. Yet the great hate of the English and Scotch geologists has lasted now half a century, and has “left deep and abundant marks upon the body of the science.” And this Hapley-Pawkins business, though perhaps a more personal affair, stirred passions as profound, if not profounder. Your common man has no conception of the zeal that animates a scientific investigator, the fury of contradiction you can arouse in him. It is the odium theologicum in a new form. There are men, for instance, who would gladly burn Professor Ray Lankester at Smithfield for his treatment of the Mollusca in the Encyclopaedia. That fantastic extension of the Cephalopods to cover the Pteropods...But I wander from Hapley and Pawkins.

It began years and years ago, with a revision of the Microlepidoptera (whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new species created by Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied by a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins.1 Pawkins, in his “Rejoinder,”2 suggested that Hapley’s microscope was as defective as his power of observation, and called him an “irresponsible meddler”—Hapley was not a professor at that time. Hapley, in his retort,3 spoke of “blundering collectors,” and described, as if inadvertently, Pawkins’ revision as a “miracle of ineptitude.” It was war to the knife. However, it would scarcely

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