Page 239 - erewhon

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. Man must consume bread
and meat or he cannot dig; the bread and meat are the fuel
which drive the spade. If a plough be drawn by horses, the
power is supplied by grass or beans or oats, which being
burnt in the belly of the cattle give the power of working:
without this fuel the work would cease, as an engine would
stop if its furnaces were to go out.
‘A man of science has demonstrated ‘that no animal has
the power of originating mechanical energy, but that all the
work done in its life by any animal, and all the heat that
has been emitted from it, and the heat which would be ob-
tained by burning the combustible matter which has been
lost from its body during life, and by burning its body after
death, make up altogether an exact equivalent to the heat
which would be obtained by burning as much food as it has
used during its life, and an amount of fuel which would
generate as much heat as its body if burned immediately af-
ter death.’ I do not know how he has found this out, but he
is a man of science—how then can it be objected against the
future vitality of the machines that they are, in their present
infancy, at the beck and call of beings who are themselves
incapable of originating mechanical energy?
‘The main point, however, to be observed as affording
cause for alarm is, that whereas animals were formerly the

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