1 02 ARISTO CRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book i Why, he asks, was the Walter press produced? In 

 order that "with great promptness" it might "meet 

 an enormous demand'' 



It is difficult to imagine a better illustration than 

 this of the part played by evolution in the domain of 

 mechanical invention. It is perfectly evident that 

 the mass of discoveries and inventions which 

 preceded and paved the way for the final invention 

 in question were due to men who had no idea in 

 their heads of such a machine as a steam-driven 

 it was the printing press at all. When printing was first 

 invented, steam-power was undreamed of. When 

 n- t ^ ie steam-engine was being perfected as a means of 



co 

 stantiyre- driving machinery, the inventors had no specific 



combined by ; 



intention. ' intention of applying this force to the printing press. 

 The men whose genius and energy in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries laid the foundation 

 of the English iron trade, and with it, as Mr. 

 Spencer says, the foundation of "machine-making 

 generally" in all probability never even saw a news- 

 paper, and could not have conceived the possibility 

 of collecting enough news daily to fill as much as 

 one page of the Times. The mathematicians and 

 chemists to whose work Mr. Spencer alludes most 

 probably never gave a thought to the practical ap- 

 plication of their discoveries, and knew as little of the 

 process of printing as they did of Chinese grammar. 

 But let us give to these facts all the weight we can. 

 Let us accept the antecedents that made the Walter 

 press possible as not only sequences but also con- 

 currences of the unintended ; and yet the part played 



