Some Few Hints We Have Determined To Venture Upon, Though We Do So
With The Profoundest Diffidence.
Firstly, we would remark that as
some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than
has descended to their more highly organised living representatives,
so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their
development and progress.
Take the watch for instance. Examine the
beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play
of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is
but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century -
it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks,
which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may
be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case
clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch
(whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size
than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct
race.
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will
suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious
questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of
creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely
to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that
we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to
the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily
giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious
contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to
them what intellect has been to the human race.
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