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an individual which springs from a single centre of repro-
ductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no
reproductive action which does not arise from a single cen-
tre; 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.
The truth is that each part of every vapour-engine is bred by
its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that
part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into
a whole forms another department of the mechanical re-
productive system, which is at present exceedingly complex
and difficult to see in its entirety.
‘Complex now, but how much simpler and more intel-
ligibly organised may it not become in another hundred
thousand years? or in twenty thousand? For man at pres-
ent believes that his interest lies in that direction; he spends
an incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in
making machines breed always better and better; he has
already succeeded in effecting much that at one time ap-
peared impossible, and there seem no limits to the results of
accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend
with modification from generation to generation. It must
always be remembered that man’s body is what it is through
having been moulded into its present shape by the chances
and changes of many millions of years, but that his organi-
sation never advanced with anything like the rapidity with
which that of the machines is advancing. This is the most
alarming feature in the case, and I must be pardoned for in-

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