Page:The Kinematics of Machinery.djvu/225

 ANTIQUITY OF MACHINES. 203

work, and having for this share the greatest proportion of the whole task. It is in both these directions, in fact, the intensive and the extensive, that modern machine industry tends to pro- gress. The two interact, and so for every improvement in the method of accomplishing any given purpose, there follows, as if instinctively, an extension of its share in the whole work.

Our aim now is not so much to describe the gradual growth of the machine in capacity, and the extension of its applications, as rather to find out by what means it has become what we now see ; —what, that is, has been the real nature of the means by which its gradual improvement has come to pass. The clearer we can make this to ourselves, the more completely we can divest it of all connected ideas, and place it by itself objectively before us, the sooner shall we succeed in the future in making conscious progress in per- fecting the machine.

For our purpose we must, so far as it is possible, trace the machine from its very origin.

If we search history for the beginnings of the machine, we find ourselves carried further and further back into the past. Every people that appears in history shows itself more or less familiar with machines, of however imperfect a kind. We do not find the actual beginnings with them, their traditions only give us infor- mation as to progress and improvement. We must, therefore, for- sake the historic for the prehistoric period. We must enter the domain of ethnology, the study of primitive peoples, of nations still in those first stages of development through which the now civilised portions of humanity must at one time have passed. For inquiry points more and more distinctly to the conclusion that the human race as a whole has everywhere grown through similar stages, pro- gressing according to great natural laws.23 The further we examine this matter, collating what we have found with the vestiges of long- perished prehistoric cultures and semi-cultures which have lately become accessible, the more distinctly shall we see that we cannot trace the machine backwards alone, but that it interweaves itself continually with the whole development of nations, indeed of the human race. We see, in other words, that we must carry our inquiries into the dim distances of the history of the development of mankind itself in order to find the first germ, the earliest root- let, of the ideas which have slowly grown through unnumbered