The comparison of similarities is endless:
I only make it because some may say that since the vapour-engine is not
likely to be improved in the main particulars, it is unlikely to be
henceforward extensively modified at all. This is too good to be true:
it will be modified and suited for an infinite variety of purposes, as
much as man has been modified so as to exceed the brutes in skill.
"In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as
our own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and pitmen and
coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships
that carry coals--what an army of servants do the machines thus employ!
Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in
tending men? Do not machines eat as it were by mannery? Are we not
ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? daily
adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily giving
them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating
self-acting power which will be better than any intellect?
"What a new thing it is for a machine to feed at all! The plough, the
spade, and the cart must eat through man's stomach; the fuel that sets
them going must burn in the furnace of a man or of horses.
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