Press printed a letter by Butler signed
"Cellarius" and headed "Darwin among the Machines," reprinted in The
Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912). The letter begins:

"Sir: There are few things of which the present generation is more
justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily
taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances"; and goes on to
say that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral,
and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, "so now, in
the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we
as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the
antediluvian types of the race." He then speaks of the minute
members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal
which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved
from the clumsy brass clocks of the thirteenth century. Then comes
the question: Who will be man's successor? To which the answer is:
We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to
the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion
being that machines are, or are becoming, animate. In 1863 Butler's
family published in his name A First Year in Canterbury Settlement,
which, as the preface states, was compiled from his letters home,
his journal and extracts from two papers contributed to the Eagle.
These two papers had appeared in the Eagle as three articles
entitled "Our Emigrant" and signed "Cellarius." The proof sheets of
the book went out to New Zealand for correction and were sent back
in the Colombo, which was as unfortunate as the Burmah, for she was
wrecked. The proofs, however, were fished up, though so nearly
washed out as to be almost undecipherable. Butler would have been
just as well pleased if they had remained at the bottom of the
Indian Ocean, for he never liked the book and always spoke of it as
being full of youthful priggishness; but I think he was a little
hard upon it. Years afterwards, in one of his later books, after
quoting two passages from Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he
considered the second to be a recantation of the first, he wrote:
"When Mr. Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead selves he
jumps upon them to some tune." And he was perhaps a little inclined
to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit.

Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864 and returned
via Callao to England. He travelled with three fr