part of the treatise. The
gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined
it carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom
of the bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be
rudimentary. I asked him what he meant.

"Sir," he answered, "this organ is identical with the rim at the bottom
of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its purpose must
have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which
it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco-
pipes, that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape
to what it is now. It will have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so
that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table
without marking it. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced
the function to its present rudimentary condition. I should not be
surprised, sir," he continued, "if, in the course of time, it were to
become modified still farther, and to assume the form of an ornamental
leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while, in some cases, it will become
extinct."

On my return to England, I looked up the point, and found that my friend
was right.

Returning, however, to the treatise, my translation recommences as
follows:-

"May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some early
form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon
the dawning life of animals which was coming into existence alongside of
its own, it would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had
surmised that animals would one day become real vegetables? Yet would
this be more mistaken than it would be on our part to imagine that
because the life of machines is a very different one to our own, there is
therefore no higher possible development of life than ours; or that
because mechanical life is a very different thing from ours, therefore
that it is not life at all?

"But I have heard it said, 'granted that this is so, and that the vapour-
engine has a strength of its own, surely no one will say that it has a
will of its own?' Alas! if we look more closely, we shall find that this
does not make against the supposition that the vapour-engine is one of
the germs of a new phase of life. What is there in this whole world, or
in the worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The Unknown and
Unknowable only!

"A man is th