58 LIFE AND HABIT. 



can read and write and sum, for by that time these 

 accomplishments will have become universal, and will 

 be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk ; but 

 they do so as a matter of course, and without self- 

 consciousness. Also they make the simpler kinds of 

 machinery too easily to be able to follow their own 

 operations — the manner of their own apprenticeship 

 being to them as a buried city. May we not imagine 

 that, after the lapse of another ten thousand years or 

 so, some one of them may again become cursed with 

 lust of introspection, and a second Harvey may astonish 

 the world by discovering that it can read and write, 

 and that steam-engines do not grow, but are made ? 

 It may be safely prophesied that he will die a martyr, 

 and be honoured in the fourth generation. 



