The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells Page A

another.
He explained to me that the comparative safety of Moreau and
himself was due to the limited mental scope of these monsters.
In spite of their increased intelligence and the tendency of their
animal instincts to reawaken, they had certain fixed ideas implanted
by Moreau in their minds, which absolutely bounded their imaginations.
They were really hypnotised; had been told that certain things
were impossible, and that certain things were not to be done,
and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond
any possibility of disobedience or dispute.
    Certain matters, however, in which old instinct was at war
with Moreau's convenience, were in a less stable condition.
A series of propositions called the Law (I had already heard them recited)
battled in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings
of their animal natures. This Law they were ever repeating,
I found, and ever breaking. Both Montgomery and Moreau displayed
particular solicitude to keep them ignorant of the taste of blood;
they feared the inevitable suggestions of that flavour.
Montgomery told me that the Law, especially among the feline Beast People,
became oddly weakened about nightfall; that then the animal was at
its strongest; that a spirit of adventure sprang up in them at the dusk,
when they would dare things they never seemed to dream about by day.
To that I owed my stalking by the Leopard-man, on the night of my arrival.
But during these earlier days of my stay they broke the Law only
furtively and after dark; in the daylight there was a general
atmosphere of respect for its multifarious prohibitions.
    And here perhaps I may give a few general facts about the island
and the Beast People. The island, which was of irregular outline
and lay low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose,
of seven or eight square miles.
[3]
It was volcanic in origin,
and was now fringed on three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles
to the northward, and a hot spring, were the only vestiges of
the forces that had long since originated it. Now and then a faint
quiver of earthquake would be sensible, and sometimes the ascent
of the spire of smoke would be rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam;
but that was all. The population of the island, Montgomery informed me,
now numbered rather more than sixty of these strange creations
of Moreau's art, not counting the smaller monstrosities
which lived in the undergrowth and were without human form.
Altogether he had made nearly a hundred and twenty; but many had died,
and others—like the writhing Footless Thing of which he had told
me—had come by violent ends. In answer to my question, Montgomery
said that they actually bore offspring, but that these generally died.
When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human form upon them.
There was no evidence of the inheritance of their acquired
human characteristics. The females were less numerous than the males,
and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy the
Law enjoined.
    It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail;
my eye has had no training in details, and unhappily I cannot sketch.
Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the
disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length
of their bodies; and yet—so relative is our idea of grace—my
eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell
in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.
Another point was the forward carriage of the head and the clumsy
and inhuman curvature of the spine. Even the Ape-man lacked
that inward sinuous curve of the back which makes the human
figure so graceful. Most had their shoulders hunched clumsily,
and their short forearms hung weakly at their sides. Few of them
were conspicuously hairy, at least until the end of my time upon
the island.
    The next most obvious deformity was in their faces,
almost all of which were prognathous, malformed about the