The X-Man who has this ability is called Quicksilver -- another name for the element mercury (Hg). And no, it didn't escape my notice that Wells also went by H. G.
This passage from "The New Accelerator" caught my attention because of its strangeness. One expects racial stereotypes from writers of Wells's era, but one also expects them to be basically accurate.
Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we [Europeans] are all the time.
Isn't that weird? The song about living fast and dying young is called "I Wanna Be a Kennedy" -- not a Takahashi or a Silberstein.
I understand that "Oriental" covered pretty much everything from Istanbul to Tokyo, embracing a wide variety of racial groups, but at least as far as the East Asian races are concerned, Wells's characterization couldn't be further from the truth. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans very clearly mature and age more slowly than Europeans. College students look like they're in junior high school. Junior high school students look like little kids. Women keep their youthful looks well into their forties and even fifties. Puberty hits later than for Europeans, old people remain spry for longer, and life expectancies are the highest in the world. Jews are also overrepresented among centenarians and certainly do not age faster than Europeans.
Indians do apparently age more quickly than Europeans (as do blacks), and they are perhaps the "Oriental" group with which Wells would have been most familiar, but are they "quicker in thought"? If IQ is taken as a reasonable proxy for such quickness, the races that outdo Europeans in that regard are the longer-lived, slower-aging Jews and East Asians, not South Asians.
