Page 253 - erewhon

when its normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and
go from bad to worse like a lunatic in a raging frenzy: but
here, again, we are met by the same consideration as before,
namely, that the machines are still in their infancy; they are
mere skeletons without muscles and flesh.
‘For how many emergencies is an oyster adapted? For as
many as are likely to happen to it, and no more. So are the
machines; and so is man himself. The list of casualties that
daily occur to man through his want of adaptability is prob-
ably as great as that occurring to the machines; and every
day gives them some greater provision for the unforeseen.
Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-
adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with
the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it sup-
plies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to those
who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its appli-
cation of its own strength; let him look at that store-house
of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers
on a railway carriage; let him see how those improvements
are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision
against the emergencies that may arise to harass the ma-
chines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years,
and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless
man can be awakened to a sense of his situation, and of the
doom which he is preparing for himself. {6}
‘The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In
his reliance upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into
increasing and multiplying. To withdraw steam power sud-
denly will not have the effect of reducing us to the state in

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