ples of all those features the
presence of which in the handiwork of animals is too often held to bar
reason and purpose from having had any share therein.

Assuredly such men as the Marquis of Worcester and Captain Savery had
very imperfect ideas as to the upshot of their own action. The simplest
steam engine now in use in England is probably a marvel of ingenuity as
compared with the highest development which appeared possible to these
two great men, while our newest and most highly complicated engines would
seem to them more like living beings than machines. Many, again, of the
steps leading to the present development have been due to action which
had but little heed of the steam engine, being the inventions of
attendants whose desire was to save themselves the trouble of turning
this or that cock, and who were indifferent to any other end than their
own immediate convenience. No step in fact along the whole route was
ever taken with much perception of what would be the next step after the
one being taken at any given moment.

Nor do we find that an engine made after any old and well-known pattern
is now made with much more consciousness of design than we can suppose a
bird's nest to be built with. The greater number of the parts of any
such engine, are made by the gross as it were like screw and nuts, which
are turned out by machinery and in respect of which the labour of design
is now no more felt than is the design of him who first invented the
wheel. It is only when circumstances require any modification in the
article to be manufactured that thought and design will come into play
again; but I take it few will deny that if circumstances compel a bird
either to give up a nest three-parts built altogether, or to make some
trifling deviation from its ordinary practice, it will in nine cases out
of ten make such deviation as shall show that it had thought the matter
over, and had on the whole concluded to take such and such a course, that
is to say, that it had reasoned and had acted with such purpose as its
reason had dictated.

And I imagine that this is the utmost that any one can claim even for
man's own boasted powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make
engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any
intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no
better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her
mate to make a nest like a blackbird.