Excerpt from The Hibbert Journal, Vol. 19 A well-known writer of our own day has worked out in highly imaginative form a scientific romance based on the idea that this earth was invaded by creatures from another planet - beings who were possessed of scientific and mechanical resources incomparably greater than ours, who were able by means of these resources to project themselves through space on to our planet to find fields for further development here, and who were prepared to treat the human race as so much dust to be cleared out of their way. The closing scenes reveal a genuine touch of genius on the writer's part. One thing these invaders, great as their knowledge was, had not reckoned with - those invisible germs of disease which have taken toll of humanity, and of our pre-human ancestors, since life began. By virtue of the natural selection of our kind, we have developed resisting power: to no germs do we succumb without a struggle: to many, our human frames are altogether immune. But directly the invaders from another world arrived, these microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. The moment they entered our atmosphere they were doomed; and at length they perished miserably through a death to them utterly mysterious and inexplicable. "Thus," says Mr Wells, "by the toll of a million million deaths, man has bought his birthright of this earth, and it is his against all comers. For neither do men live nor die in vain." This struggle for bodily immunity is a parable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.