EEYIEWS — TECHNOLOGY. 57 



Again, the fancies employed in the illustration of the following 

 contrast between the products of instinct and reasoning intelligence, 

 are happily put before the student of Technology : — 



" It is with every-day life, and every-day cares, that Teehaology, in one aspect, 

 has to do ; with man, not as ' a little lower than the angels,' but ' as crushed before 

 the moth,' and weaker than the weakest of the beasts that perish ; with man as a 

 hungry, thirsty, restless, quarelsome, naked animal. But it is also the province 

 of Technology to show, that man, because he is this, and just because he is this, 

 is raised by the industrial conquests which he is compelled to achieve, to a place 

 of power and dignity, separating him by an absolutely immeasurable interval from 

 every other animal. 



" It might appear, at first sight, as if it were not so. As industrial creatures 

 we often look like wretched copyists of animals, far beneath us in the scale of 

 organisation, ami we seem to confess as much by the names which we give them. 

 The mason-wasp,Jthe carpenter-bee, the miniDg caterpillars, the quarryiu^ sea-slugs 

 execute their work in a way which we cannot rival or excel. The bird is an ex- 

 quisite architect ; the beaver a most skilful bridge builder ; the silk-worm the 

 most beautiful of weavers ; the spider the best of net-makers. Each is a perfect 

 craftsman, and each has his tools always at hand. Those wise creatures, I believe, 

 have minds like our own, to the extent that they have minds, and are not mere 

 living machines, swayed by a blind instinct. They will do one thing rather than 

 another, and do that one thing in different ways at different times. A bird, for 

 example, selects a place to build its nest upon, and accommodates its form to the 

 particular locality it has chosen ; and a bee alters the otherwise invariable shape 

 of its cell, when the space it is working in forbids it to carry out its hexagonal 

 plan. Yet, it is impossible to watch these, or others amoDg the lower animals, 

 and fail to see that, to a great extent, they are mere living machines, saved from 

 the care and anxiety which lie so heavily upon us, by their entire contentment 

 with the preseut, their oblivion of the past, and their indifference to the future. 

 They do invent, they do design, they do exercise volition in wonderful ways ; but 

 their most wonderful works imply neither invention, contrivance, nor volition, but 

 only a placid, pleasant, easily rendered obedience to instincts which reign without 

 rivals, and justify their despotic rule, by the infallible hapjjmess which they secure, 

 There is nothing, accordingly, obsolete, nothing tentative, nothing progressive, in 

 the labours of the most wonderful mechanicians among the lower animals. It has 

 cost none of thes'e ingenious artists any intellectual effort to learn its craft, for God 

 gave it to each perfect in the beginning ; and within the circle to which they apply. 

 the rules which guide their work are infallible, and know no variation. 



" No feathered Ruskiu appears among the birds, to discuss before them whether 

 their nests 6hould be built on the principles of Grecian or Gothic architecture. 

 Ho beaver, in advance of his age, patents a diving-bell. No glow-worm advocates, 

 in the hearing of her conservative sisters, the merits of new vesta-lights, or im- 

 proved Lueifer matches. The silk- worms entertain no proposition regarding the 

 substitution of machinery for bodily labour. The spiders never divide the House 

 on the question of a Ten Hours Working Bill. The ants are at one on their Corn- 

 laws. The wasps are content with their Game-laws. The bees never alter their 

 tax ' nor dream of lessening the severities of their penal codes their 



drones ore slaughtered as relentlessly as they were three thousand years ago ; nor 



