eetness, and the dog in self-sacrifice?

"It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject, that
the machines can never be developed into animate or _quasi_-animate
existences, inasmuch as they have no reproductive system, nor seem ever
likely to possess one. If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry,
and that we are never likely to see a fertile union between two vapour-
engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed, however
greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant it. But the
objection is not a very profound one. No one expects that all the
features of the now existing organisations will be absolutely repeated in
an entirely new class of life. The reproductive system of animals
differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive systems.
Has nature exhausted her phases of this power?

"Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically,
we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive
system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the
machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other
machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not
insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole
families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a
class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the
red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the
humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one.
The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. Each
one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose entity was
entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind with no
thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures
are part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of
the machines?

"But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines
after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was not
made by, neither will it ever make, a thimble. Here, again, if we turn
to nature we shall find abundance of analogies which will teach us that a
reproductive system may be in full force without the thing produced being
of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce
after their own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality