, on the whole, been long
surpassed? Has she not allowed the ant and the bee to retain superiority over
man in the organization of their communities and social arrangements, the bird
in traversing the air, the fish in swimming, the horse in strength and
fleetness, and the dog in self-sacrifice?
    It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject, that the
machines can never be developed into animate or quasi-animate existences,
inasmuch as they have no reproductive system, nor seem ever likely to possess
one. If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry, and that we are never
likely to see a fertile union between two vapour-engines with the young ones
playing about the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I
will readily grant it. But the objection is not a very profound one. No one
expects that all the features of the now existing organizations will be
absolutely repeated in an entirely new class of life. The reproductive system of
animals differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive systems.
Has nature exhausted her phases of this power?
    Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we
may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it
be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which
have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that
makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants
reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their
fertilization was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to
themselves? Does anyone say that the red clover has no reproductive system
because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it
can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of
the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose
entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind with
no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures are
part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of the
machines?
    But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines after
their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was not made by,
neither will it ever make, a thimble. Here, again, if we turn to nature we shall
find abundance of analogies which will teach us that a reproductive system may
be in full force