That is to say, the ability which produces modern machines is in reality just as much a force of nature as that which makes live-stock fertile, and brings raw wine to maturity.

But the same line of argument will carry us much farther than this.

As Dr.Beattie Crozier has shown in his work, _The Wheel of Wealth_, the part which nature plays in productive machinery is not confined to the brains of the gifted inventors and their colleagues.

It is incorporated in, and identified with, the actual machines themselves.

The lever, the cam, the eccentric, the crank, the piston, the turbine, the boiler with the vapour imprisoned in it--devices which it has taxed the brains of the greatest men to elaborate and to co-ordinate--were all latent in nature before these men made them actual; and when once such devices are actualised it is nature that makes them go.