“And take man’s vaunted power of calculation.  Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can?  What prizeman in Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare with some of these machines in their own line?  In fact, wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far preferable to himself.  Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch; the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink not.  This is the green tree; what then shall be done in the dry?

“Who shall say that a man does see or hear?  He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all.  May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines?  An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?

“It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city.  When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town?  No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town’s body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into the heart,—­which receive the venous lines, and disgorge the arterial, with an eternal pulse of people.  And the sleep of the town, how life-like! with its change in the circulation.”

Here the writer became again so hopelessly obscure that I was obliged to miss several pages.  He resumed:-

“It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to discharge the service which man expects from it, it is doomed to extinction; that the machines stand to man simply in the relation of lower animals, the vapour-engine itself being only a more economical kind of horse; so that instead of being likely to be developed into a higher kind of life than man’s, they owe their very existence and progress to their power of ministering to human wants, and must therefore both now and ever be man’s inferiors.