13
of the Amazons. The nightingale, though he is a poet, builds and furnishes his nest without any help from the raven, who despises the fine arts; and the lark does not excuse herself from her household duties, because she is an excellent musician.
Nor are there degrees of skill among the animal artists. The beavers pay no consulting fees to eminent beaver engineers experienced in hydraulics; the coral insects do not offer higher wages to skilled workmen at reef-building; every nautilus is an equally good sailor; and the wasps engaged in "just and necessary wars," offer no bounties to tempt veteran soldiers into their armies. Hence, there will never be Professorships of Technology among any of those craftsmen; for a Professor of Technology could teach them nothing, and they allow no sinecures.
The industrialness, then, of man, of which Technology is the fruit and the exposition, is carried out in a way quite peculiar to himself, and singularly illustrative of his combined weakness and greatness. The most helpless, physically, of animals, and yet the one with the greatest number of pressing appetites and desires, he has no working instincts, to secure (at least after infancy) the gratification of his most pressing wants, and no tools which such instincts can work by. He is compelled, therefore, to fall back upon the powers of his reason and understanding, and make his intellect serve him instead of a crowd of instinctive impulses, and his intellect-guided hand instead of an apparatus of tools. Before that hand, armed with the tools which it has fashioned, and that intellect, which marks man as made in the image of God, the instincts and weapons of the entire animal creation are as nothing. He reigns, by right of conquest, as indisputably as by right of inheritance, the king of this world. And yet, a strange aspect of imperfection and incompleteness belongs to our human works, and a dark shadow hangs over them all. We can as little realise our ideal in industrial as in æsthetic art. As masons, carpenters, bridge-builders, railway-makers, and the like, our labours never content us. We blunder through our work, groping in the dark by the help of imperfect lights, often committing the greatest errors, failing in our object, or, whilst gaining it, involving ourselves in fearful suffering or even in destruction. If it were not so, there would be no need for Chairs of Technology; but it is a humiliating and sorrowful confession that such should be the case- The preventable human suffering, and the needless loss of human life, which are occasioned by our industrial doings, are in amount alto-
