ABSTRACT
H. G. Wells was a figure to conjure with the modern period under review. He is perhaps best known for a group of popular scientific romances that appeared in the last years of the nineteenth century and for works of social realism that appeared early in the twentieth, though his first substantial work was a textbook of biology that went through numerous editions. Wells had studied Francis Galton's work on eugenics and was clearly committed to the importance of its possibilities, an issue which he takes up in directly in The Science of Life. Ultimately the scientific and technocratic elite whose minds, like Wells's. are 'systematically unified' and equipped 'to get things ruthlessly mapped out and consistent' are the ones to 'clean up the problem of methods and organisation for the world-mind.' The idea of the need to do something constructive about the management of knowledge is a long-standing theme in Wells's writing.
