Certain classes of machines may be alone fertile, while
the rest discharge other functions in the mechanical system, just as the
great majority of ants and bees have nothing to do with the continuation
of their species, but get food and store it, without thought of breeding.
One cannot expect the parallel to be complete or nearly so; certainly not
now, and probably never; but is there not enough analogy existing at the
present moment, to make us feel seriously uneasy about the future, and to
render it our duty to check the evil while we can still do so? Machines
can within certain limits beget machines of any class, no matter how
different to themselves. Every class of machines will probably have its
special mechanical breeders, and all the higher ones will owe their
existence to a large number of parents and not to two only.
"We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing;
in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly
after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and
individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination
forms an individual which springs from a single centre of reproductive
action; we therefore assume that there can be no reproductive action
which does not arise from a single centre; but this assumption is
unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapour-engine was ever made
entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to
warrant us in saying that vapour-engines have no reproductive system.
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