32 THE WORLD MACHINE 



nebular hypothesis, the light-bearing ether, the atomic theory, 

 and all their like, may be but convenient " working hypotheses," 

 but it is well to remember that, in the absence of negative proof, 

 they stand on more or less the same footing as the hypothesis 

 that a being you call you, O Indulgent Reader, scans these 

 lines. 



The phantoms of Idealism were born in Greece ; and though 

 many have embraced, they have proven as barren as the vestal 

 virgins of final causes. Stimulated by the amazing results of 

 his endeavour to learn something of the world about him, man 

 sometime since turned from inquiries into the nature of being 

 to an examination of the parts of which his own being was 

 composed. 



If in his discovery of the revolutions of the earth he had 

 bagged an engaging paradox, in his anatomical studies he cap- 

 tured a troop. For he was not long in perceiving that the 

 various parts of himself bore a singular resemblance to the 

 implements and contrivances of his workaday life. Little by 

 little he came to see that the heart is a pump and the blood- 

 vessels an intricate system of irrigation. The lungs are bellows, 

 worked automatically from a centre at the base of the brain. 

 The muscles are pulleys and the bones are cranes. The eye is 

 a telescope, the ear an inverted megaphone. The kidneys are 

 filters, the liver is a sugar factory, the stomach a vat for fer- 

 menting food, the thirty feet of coiled piping of the intestines 

 the vital still where strength, warmth, courage, good feelings and 

 bad, and all our outlook upon life are brewed. 



Even the process of reproduction .he came to realise was 

 much like planting corn in the field ; and if the growth of the 

 corn was mysterious, hardly less so was the working of yeast 

 in a lump of dough, or that a mixture of charcoal, nitre, and 

 sulphur, properly pent up and set fire to, should throw a cannon- 

 ball some miles. 



Moreover, the chemical ingredients making up this strange 

 being, capable at once of the sublimity of astronomical dis- 

 coveries, and of burning old women, maidens, and men for 

 witches or heretics sometimes so near a god, sometimes a 

 ravening savage were found to be simple in the extreme. 

 Water is the most important by nine-tenths. We know how 

 water, skilfully mixed with a little glue or gelatine, makes a 



