He is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection.

"[3] The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic work of early science fiction[4] and remains one of Wells's best-known books.

The novel is the earliest depiction of the science fiction motif "uplift" in which a more advanced race intervenes in the evolution of an animal species to bring the latter to a higher level of intelligence.

[6] Edward Prendick is an Englishman with a scientific education who survives a shipwreck of his boat, the Lady Vain, in the southern Pacific Ocean.

Prendick remembers that he has heard of Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist in London whose gruesome experiments in vivisection had been publicly exposed, and who fled Great Britain as a result of his exposure.

Prendick returns to the enclosure where Moreau explains that he has been on the island for eleven years and has been striving to make a complete transformation of an animal to a human.

He also states that pain is an animalistic instinct that one who is truly human cannot have, cutting his thigh with a penknife with no apparent reaction, to further prove his point.

Since eating flesh and tasting blood are strong prohibitions, Dr. Moreau calls an assembly of the Beast Folk and identifies the Leopard-Man (the same one that chased Prendick the first time he wandered into the jungle) as the transgressor.

Prendick resolves to leave the island, but later hears a commotion outside in which Montgomery, his servant M'ling, and the Sayer of the Law die after a scuffle with the Beast Folk.

With no chance of saving any of the provisions stored in the enclosure, Prendick realizes that Montgomery has also destroyed the only boats on the island during the night.

As the time goes by, the Beast Folk increasingly revert to their original animal instincts, beginning to hunt the island's rabbits, returning to walking on all fours, and leaving their shared living areas for the wild.

The Beast Folk are animals which Moreau has experimented upon, giving them human traits via vivisection for which the surgery is extremely painful.

[9] The Island of Dr. Moreau reflects the ethical, philosophical, and scientific concerns and controversies raised by these themes and the ideas of Darwinian evolution which were so disrupting to social norms in the late 1800s.

There was a scandalous trial about that time, the graceless and pitiful downfall of a man of genius, and this story was the response of an imaginative mind to the reminder that humanity is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape and in perpetual internal conflict between instinct and injunction.

When the reader comes to read the writings upon history in this collection, he will find the same idea of man as a re-shaped animal no longer in flaming caricature, but as a weighed and settled conviction.The novel has been adapted to films and other media on multiple occasions.

Wells expounded upon his firm belief that the events depicted in The Island of Doctor Moreau are entirely possible should such vivisective experiments ever be tested outside the confines of science fiction.

Until recently, modern medicine has shown that non-human animals lack the necessary brain structure to emulate human faculties like speech.