 manner a
diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and
progress.
    Take the watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure; observe the
intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little
creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no
deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the
present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the
universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as
ichthyosauri, while the watch, whose tendency has for some years been to
decrease in size rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of
an extinct race.
    But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the
existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are
becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of
beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that
movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is
it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which
are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves
harmless?
    As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man's
senses; one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and
the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the
voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee
would have been deaf to the caller. There was a time when it must have seemed
highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound,
even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come
when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the
delicacy of the machine's own construction? - when its language shall have been
developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?
    It is possible that by that time children will learn the differential
calculus - as they learn now to speak - from their mothers and nurses, or that
they may talk in the hypothetical language, and work rule of three sums, as soon
as they are born; but this is not probable; we cannot calculate on any
corresponding advance in man's intellectual or physical powers which shall be a
set-off against the far greater development which seems in store for the
machines. Some people may say that
