“Sir:  There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances”; and goes on to say that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral, and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, “so now, in the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian types of the race.”  He then speaks of the minute members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved from the clumsy brass clocks of the thirteenth century.  Then comes the question:  Who will be man’s successor?  To which the answer is:  We are ourselves creating our own successors.  Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate.  In 1863 Butler’s family published in his name A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which, as the preface states, was compiled from his letters home, his journal and extracts from two papers contributed to the Eagle.  These two papers had appeared in the Eagle as three articles entitled “Our Emigrant” and signed “Cellarius.”  The proof sheets of the book went out to New Zealand for correction and were sent back in the Colombo, which was as unfortunate as the Burmah, for she was wrecked.  The proofs, however, were fished up, though so nearly washed out as to be almost undecipherable.  Butler would have been just as well pleased if they had remained at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, for he never liked the book and always spoke of it as being full of youthful priggishness; but I think he was a little hard upon it.  Years afterwards, in one of his later books, after quoting two passages from Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he considered the second to be a recantation of the first, he wrote:  “When Mr. Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune.”  And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit.

Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864 and returned via Callao to England.  He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he dedicated Life and Habit.  He arrived in August, 1864, in London, where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, a painting-room and a pantry, at 15 Clifford’s Inn, second floor (north).  The net financial result of the sheep-farming and the selling out was that he practically doubled his capital, that is to say he had about 8000 pounds.  This he left in New Zealand, invested on mortgage at 10 per cent, the then current rate in the colony; it produced more than enough for him to live upon in the very simple way that suited him best, and life in the Inns of Court resembles life at Cambridge in that it reduces the cares of housekeeping to a minimum; it suited him so well that he never changed his rooms, remaining there thirty-eight years till his death.