To me, HG Wells is a good science fiction author but pretty bad at scientific writing. I'm starting to be critical about romanticizing science in fiction and this is one. The Island of Dr Moreau is probably one of the book that spark all those shapeshifter stories and romances. Much like Frankenstein, the scientific method was absent while it emphasize on the heavily controversial parts of humanoid animals appropriation and the philosophical parts from the resultant effects of it. But it does engage the readers with thoughts of scientific ethics. There's also the use of classical conditioning methods and negative reinforcement which was slightly ahead of its time. 
 But it is a fantasy novella and a parody of science with many B-movie horror story tropes. There's also some religious undertone in it. Basically, there was a lot of symbolism that play around the foreign nature of scientific progress. It assume that all scientist are crazy, experimental folks with no concern of what happen in the future whenever their experiments succeed. I mean hello, how many triplicates I did and failed experiments and waste resources I did in my life. Sure, there are crazy smart scientists out there but seriously the author overreach itself about the miracle idea of science. Then again, this was before the World Wars so to a degree, there was some truth in this book on the scientific community from a public point of view but it doesn't age well.