examine its beautiful structure; observe
the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this
little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded
it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which
certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be
superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will
become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the watch, whose tendency has
for some years been to decrease in size rather than the contrary, will
remain the only existing type of an extinct race.

"But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the
existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which
they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.
No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement
forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked
while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to
destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present,
though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?

"As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of
man's senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent
of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of
the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there
been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller. There was
a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should
learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man;
may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be
no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the
machine's own construction?--when its language shall have been developed
from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?

"It is possible that by that time children will learn the differential
calculus--as they learn now to speak--from their mothers and nurses, or
that they may talk in the hypothetical language, and work rule of three
sums, as soon as they are born; but this is not probable; we cannot
calculate on any corresponding advance in man's intellectual or physical
powers which shall be a set-off against the far greater development which
seems in store for the machines. Some people may say that man's moral
influence will suffice to rule them