The day may come when clocks,
which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may
be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case
clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch
(whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size
than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct
race.
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will
suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious
questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of
creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely
to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that
we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to
the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily
giving them greater power and supplying, by all sorts of ingenious
contrivances, that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be
to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of
ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power,
inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to
them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to
aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires
will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures.
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