changes, but slowly also. She is poorly off for hands, and has never
fairly grasped the notion of tacking on other limbs to the limbs of
her own body, and so being short lived to boot she remains from
century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never
becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism which has been
introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very
quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain
fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the
change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around
him, is greater and greater. He is a shifting basis on which no
equilibrium of habit and civilisation can be established. Were it
not for this constant change in our physical powers, which our
mechanical limbs have brought about, man would have long since
apparently attained his limit of possibility; he would be a creature
of as much fixity as the ants and bees; he would still have advanced,
but no faster than other animals advance.

If there were a race of men without any mechanical appliances we
should see this clearly. There are none, nor have there been, so far
as we can tell, for millions and millions of years. The lowest
Australian savage carries weapons for the fight or the chase, and has
his cooking and drinking utensils at home; a race without these
things would be completely ferae naturae and not men at all. We are
unable to point to any example of a race absolutely devoid of extra-
corporaneous limbs, but we can see among the Chinese that with the
failure to invent new limbs a civilisation becomes as much fixed as
that of the ants; and among savage tribes we observe that few
implements involve a state of things scarcely human at all. Such
tribes only advance pari passu with the creatures upon which they
feed.