all rolling, and the prospect of advantage
keeping it in motion. In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode
of development by which human organism is now especially advancing, every
past invention being an addition to the resources of the human body. Even
community of limbs is thus rendered possible to those who have so much
community of soul as to own money enough to pay a railway fare; for a
train is only a seven-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once."

The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the
machines would so equalise men's powers, and so lessen the severity of
competition, that many persons of inferior physique would escape
detection and transmit their inferiority to their descendants. He feared
that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the
human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely
rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an
intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action.

"How greatly," he wrote, "do we not now live with our external limbs? We
vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with advancing or
decreasing wealth. If it is wet we are furnished with an organ commonly
called an umbrella, and which is designed for the purpose of protecting
our clothes or our skins from the injurious effects of rain. Man has now
many extra-corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a
good deal of his hair, or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes
in his pocket-book. He becomes more and more complex as he grows older;
he will then be seen with see-engines, or perhaps with artificial teeth
and hair: if he be a really well-developed specimen of his race, he will
be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a coachman."

It was this writer who originated the custom of classifying men by their
horse-power, and who divided them into genera, species, varieties, and
subvarieties, giving them names from the hypothetical language which
expressed the number of limbs which they could command at any moment. He
showed that men became more highly and delicately organised the more
nearly they approached the summit of opulence, and that none but
millionaires possessed the full complement of limbs with which mankind
could become incorporate.

"Those mighty organisms," he continued, "our leading bankers and
merchants, speak to their congeners through the length and bre