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EREWHON.

and mechanism. "How greatly," he writes, "do we not now live with our external limbs?"

"We vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with advancing or decreasing wealth. If it is wet we are furnished with an organ commonly called an umbrella, and which is designed for the purpose of protecting our clothes or our skins from the injurious effects of rain. Man has now many extra-corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair, or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocket-book. He becomes more and more complex as he grows older; he will then be seen with see-engines, or perhaps with artificial teeth and hair: if he be a really well-developed specimen of his race, he will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses and a coachman."

The writer proceeded to say, that men should be classified by their genera, species, varieties, and subvarieties, and that names should be given to each class from the hypothetical language, which should express the number of limbs which they could command at any moment; for he said that those who could identify themselves with a special train whenever they pleased, were far more highly organised than those whose means of locomotion were confined to their own legs. In fact, he it was who originated the custom of reckoning men by their horse-power, and who pointed out that those alone possessed the full complement of limbs who stood in the first rank of opulence; the great merchants and bankers being the most astonishing organisms which the world had ever seen.

And so he went on at considerable length; but the