view forward. Of this letter I have lost the only copy I had; I have
not seen it for years. The first was certainly not good; the second,
if I remember rightly, was a good deal worse, though I believed more
in the views it put forward than in those of the first letter. I had
lost my copy before I wrote "Erewhon," and therefore only gave a
couple of pages to it in that book; besides, there was more amusement
in the other view. I should perhaps say there was an intermediate
extension of the first letter which appeared in the Reasoner, July 1,
1865.

In 1870 and 1871, when I was writing "Erewhon," I thought the best
way of looking at machines was to see them as limbs which we had made
and carried about with us or left at home at pleasure. I was not,
however, satisfied, and should have gone on with the subject at once
if I had not been anxious to write "The Fair Haven," a book which is
a development of a pamphlet I wrote in New Zealand and published in
London in 1865.

As soon as I had finished this, I returned to the old subject, on
which I had already been engaged for nearly a dozen years as
continuously as other business would allow, and proposed to myself to
see not only machines as limbs, but also limbs as machines. I felt
immediately that I was upon firmer ground. The use of the word
"organ" for a limb told its own story; the word could not have become
so current under this meaning unless the idea of a limb as a tool or
machine had been agreeable to common sense. What would follow, then,
if we regarded our limbs and organs as things that we had ourselves
manufactured for our convenience?

The first question that suggested itself was, how did we come to make