plain that the machines are gaining ground upon
us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down
to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the
advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

"The vapour-engine must be fed with food and consume it by fire even as
man consumes it; it supports its combustion by air as man supports it; it
has a pulse and circulation as man has. It may be granted that man's
body is as yet the more versatile of the two, but then man's body is an
older thing; give the vapour-engine but half the time that man has had,
give it also a continuance of our present infatuation, and what may it
not ere long attain to?

"There are certain functions indeed of the vapour-engine which will
probably remain unchanged for myriads of years--which in fact will
perhaps survive when the use of vapour has been superseded: the piston
and cylinder, the beam, the fly-wheel, and other parts of the machine
will probably be permanent, just as we see that man and many of the lower
animals share like modes of eating, drinking, and sleeping; thus they
have hearts which beat as ours, veins and arteries, eyes, ears, and
noses; they sigh even in their sleep, and weep and yawn; they are
affected by their children; they feel pleasure and pain, hope, fear,
anger, shame; they have memory and prescience; they know that if certain
things happen to them they will die, and they fear death as much as we
do; they communicate their thoughts to one another, and some of them
deliberately act in concert. The comparison of similarities is endless:
I only make it because some may say that since the vapour-engine is not
likely to be improved in the main particulars, it is unlikely to be
henceforward extensively modified at all. This is too good to be true:
it will be modified and suited for an infinite variety of purposes, as
much as man has been modified so as to exceed the brutes in skill.

"In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as
our own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and pitmen and
coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships
that carry coals--what an army of servants do the machines thus employ!
Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in
tending men? Do not machines eat as it were by mannery? Are we not
ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? daily
adding to the beau