But that is only an inference from reading his confused order, and if he tells me that what he had meant to say was that there were two kinds of late Paleolithic men, one of whom had bows and arrows and the others had not, of course I accept what he says. Only, he should have written it plainly, and he should not have illustrated the part describing the men who had no bow and arrows with a large picture in which bows and arrows are the main thing.
The other case of the Tasmanian is a similar example of confused writing. Let the reader judge.
We have on page 43 and what follows a description of Neanderthal Man.
It is, as is usual with Mr. Wells, a mass of vague guess work, on very little evidence, put forward as certain facts. We have also the judgment of the author that those who regard Neanderthal Man as no ancestor of ours, but a side-line of development, have his approval; though he admits that the other view is held. This on page 49.
Then Mr. Wells steps sideways again. “No doubt” our own breed, “which includes the Tasmanians, was a very similar and parallel creature.” There is, of course, no ground for that “no doubt,” but that is by the way. He next goes on to say that some imaginary ancestor of ours and of the Tasmanians (whom he generously admits to be men), is not so far from us as to have allowed contemporary types to have eliminated, not indeed Neanderthal but the Neanderthaloid types. Then, on page 52, there is a smart return to the original position that Neanderthal Man was not an early type of our own breed, and that true men did not intermix with him.
Mr. Wells may protest against my calling all this sort of thing a rigmarole, but I think that is the right word for it. It is certainly not history, and, above all, it is not clear.
The confused impression left upon the reader’s mind by the confused writing is that Neanderthal Man was not true man, and yet that true man must have passed through a Neanderthal stage, having been both Neanderthal and not Neanderthal: as it were, so to speak, and somehow.
However, a critic’s misreading, though caused by the confusion of the author’s style and the lack of orderly arrangement in his mind, is none the less a misreading, and Mr. Wells may rest assured that when my book appears it shall be corrected. My perplexed guess at what Mr. Wells really meant shall be replaced by his own statement of what he meant, and I will, in these two cases of the Bow and the Tasmanian, emphasise the muddlement of his method while apologising for the error into which it led me as to his intention.
With this I conclude my review of Mr. Wells’s specific grievances of misstatement.
They are, as I have pointed out, only six in number. Out of a prolonged examination—covering nearly a hundred thousand words—he could find no others.