THE ANATOMY OF A MACHINE
EVERY animal is a complex machine, provided with its own motive power and a brain for directing the operation of its own mechanical elements. Not satisfied with the mechanism that nature has put into the human machine, man has reached for other elements and devised mechanisms of his own in order to supplement the human machine and increase its efficiency. At first, as we have seen, these elements were hand tools of the crudest sort; but they were gradually improved and then they were combined into what we term machines. In developing these machines, he naturally took his own system as a pattern and was guided to a large extent by an examination of his own physical structure. We see this very clearly in the names of the different parts of machinery, which are taken from the names of similar parts in the human frame. Almost every member of the body is used in mechanical terminology. For instance, we have the “head” and the “foot,” the “arms” and the “legs,” the “fingers” ...