will any one tell me that that steam is the calculating power of the 
machine ? The man who made the machine says he derived the idea from 
hearing that Mr. Babbage was making one like it. But what did that man 
possess ? He possessed wonderful powers of calculation ; but, more than 
that, he also possessed mechanical genius: he possessed the knowledge and 
power which were necessary to enable him properly to combine and arrange 
all the different materials for his machine. And now I will tell you a very 
curious thing with regard to that machine. The godfather of that machine, 
who was most concerned in its manufacture, told me that he asked one of 
the most distinguished mathematicians of our day — one of the best calculators 
in the country— to go and see the machine, but he replied : “ It is perfectly 
useless for me to see it, for I should not be able to comprehend it at all. I 
should see nothing but so many wheels, and iron and steel bars, and so on ; 
and they would give me no notion at all, because I cannot understand 
mechanical combinations.” One of the first machines of that kind which 
was ever constructed went to Paris, and was exhibited there ; and Professor 
Babbage said that none of the Frenchmen comprehended it, and that he got 
it a gold medal simply on his statement, that it was sound and good, and 
would do its work properly. The Frenchmen said : “ Well, you understand 
it ; and upon your testimony we will give it a gold medal. It is a most 
wonderful thing ; and you can make it turn out millions and millions of 
square roots and logarithms, and other calculations. It is a great work of 
human intellect ; and no one could have made it without exerting the power 
of human intellect to cause all those dead particles of brass, and copper, and 
zinc, and wood, to be so arranged as to produce certain arithmetical com- 
binations.” But all these materials would be totally useless unless you had 
a skilled hand to direct it, and to know what figures are to be placed in it 
to produce those results. N ow we find the same difference between the organic 
and inorganic bodies with which we deal. I grant that if you investigate the 
matter, the laws which regulate the inorganic world are quite as marvellous, 
quite as incomprehensible, and go as far beyond man’s limited powers of reason 
and understanding, as the laws of the organic world. The laws and arrangements 
of the one are as marvellous and as incomprehensible as the laws and arrange- 
ments of the other. But there are marked distinctions between them, which 
are perfectly comprehensible to mind, reason, and intellect, and perfectly 
conformable to true scientific induction and scientific analysis. Let me 
take a hen’s egg. You have there a most marvellous structure : you have 
first a marvellous outside casing of carbonate of lime, not arranged according 
to the forms of crystallography, in which the particles of carbonate of lime 
would fall if allowed to arrange themselves, but built up and arranged in as 
wonderful a manner as the bricks and stones which form the dome of any 
great building, just as you see in such a wonderful structure of human 
intellect as Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral. But, passing by the 
shell, you find that that wonderful case contains within it as good an example 
of pure protoplasm as any of the substances which Professor Huxley has 
called our attention to. When we come to analyze it, we find not 
