The title story opens with a bacteriologist demonstrating a cholera culture to a pale-faced visitor, who responds with a "morbid pleasure" that the scientist notes with unease. This dynamic—the expert's composure set against the visitor's barely concealed hunger—recurs throughout the collection. Wells repeatedly places characters at the threshold of discovery or disaster, where a single slip, a misjudged glance, or a stolen tube can tip the balance. The stories are less about the marvels of science than about the human impulses that twist knowledge into threat.

The Scientist as Uneasy Custodian

In "The Stolen Bacillus," the bacteriologist keeps "bottled cholera" in sealed tubes, aware of its potential for devastation. His visitor, introduced by a note from an old friend, is drawn to the tube with an intensity that the scientist finds unsettling. Wells underlines the contrast between the two men: one sees a tool for study, the other a weapon. This pattern appears elsewhere—in "The Lord of the Dynamos," where a worshipper of a machine misunderstands its power, and in "The Diamond Maker," where a secret process becomes a burden. The scientist's authority is never absolute; it is shadowed by the risk that his knowledge will be seized by someone who lacks his restraint.

Narratives of Pursuit and Isolation

Several stories unfold as first-person accounts of desperate chases or solitary struggles. In the excerpt from "Aepyornis Island," the narrator swims after a stolen canoe under a phosphorescent sea, his knife in his mouth, while the stars and glowing water blur his sense of direction. The scene is rendered with precise physical detail—the ache in his limbs, the "liquid fire" of the ripple—and a mounting awareness of absurdity. He damns "Dawsons and Jamrachs and Museums" in a scream. Wells often strands his characters in remote settings: a swamp, an observatory, a taxidermist's workshop. The isolation amplifies the tension between rational planning and the chaotic demands of the moment.

The Ordinary Made Unstable

Wells's settings are frequently mundane—a laboratory, a window, a park—but they become stages for sudden disruption. In "Through a Window," the title suggests a passive observer, yet the story's tension derives from what enters that frame. The author's prose is economical, favoring concrete nouns and active verbs: the visitor "devouring the little tube with his eyes"; the canoe "waltzing" on the water. These small, vivid gestures carry the weight of larger threats. The collection's title itself juxtaposes the clinical ("Bacillus") with the everyday ("Incidents"), hinting that catastrophe may arrive not as a grand event but as a minor slip—a tube left unguarded, a paddle lost to a lucky shot.

Readers approaching these stories will find that Wells's interest lies less in the scientific premise than in the human reaction to it. The narratives reward attention to small details—a hesitation, a gleam of satisfaction, a misaimed shot—that signal the turning point. The collection is best read as a series of experiments in tension, each calibrated to a different pressure point between reason and impulse.