The two most interesting points about the above passage are firstly, that it was written, not by an engineer, but by a natural scientist; and secondly, that the title of the essay from which it is taken is _Capital and Labour_. That is to say, the abundance of mechanical simile in it is neither the natural colouring of an imagination subdued to what it works in, nor a deliberate system of metaphors fabricated with the object of figuring forth a biological process to the uninitiated. On the contrary, the notion of child-birth is itself only introduced for the purpose of illustration. The images by which it is conveyed are thus revealed as the natural furniture of the writer’s imagination. They can no longer have been images to him, but rather his normal outlook on the chain of facts in which he was most interested; and the passage is, of course, only one of thousands in which we can see nineteenth-century imagination working in a similar way. It would be of small general interest to give a list of all the mechanical and technical words which had come into our vocabulary since the middle of the seventeenth century—words like _calculus_, _centrifugal_, _dynamic_, _galvanize_, _inertia_, _momentum_, _oscillate_, _polarity_, _reciprocating_, _rotate_, _vibrate_ (except in the sense ‘to brandish’),[55]... We are concerned more with their influence on the meanings of older words. And from this point of view the passage quoted from Huxley can indeed give us a fair idea of the untold changes that were secretly brewing when, for instance, the word _mechanic_ (Greek ‘mēchanē’, a ‘device’, or ‘contrivance’) lost its old meaning of ‘pertaining to manual labour’, and began to be applied to machines. This happened in the seventeenth century, when also the word _machine_, which had formerly been used of plots and intrigues, or for any kind of erection, was first used with its modern meaning. We begin to hear of the six “Mechanick Faculties” or “Simple Machines”, i.e. the _Balance_, _Lever_, _Pulley_, _Screw_, _Wedge_, and _Wheel_; and in a little book called _Mathematicall Magick_, by Bishop Wilkins, one of the first members of the Royal Society, these are discussed with great enthusiasm and many respectful references to Aristotle. It is in the same work that we first hear in English of a science of _Mechanics_. This new science, foreshadowed to some extent by Aristotle, from whose treatise with that title we take the word, had quickly been carried farther by his successor, Archimedes. Most civilizations seem to have produced towards their close mechanical devices of one kind or another, but more especially “engines” of war. What distinguishes our own is the way in which mechanism has gradually entered into our outlook—a fact which is marked, among other things, by our use of the Greek prefix ‘auto-’ (self) for things worked by machinery. In a Greek dictionary we find upwards of two hundred words beginning with this prefix, but