brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early airplanes seemed in some ways like bicycles. The transformations of technology gave the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being. Samuel Butler raised great admiration in Bernard Shaw by his insight that the evolutionary process had been fantastically accelerated by transference to the machine mode. Shaw, however, was happy to leave the matter in this delightfully opaque state. Butler, himself, had at least indicated that machines were given vicarious powers of reproduction by their subsequent impact upon the very bodies that had brought them into being by extension. Response to the increased power and speed of our own extended bodies is one which engenders new extensions. Every technology creates new stresses and needs in the human beings who have engendered it. The new need and the new technological response are born of our embrace of the already existing technology a ceaseless process. Those familiar with the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett need not be reminded of the rich clowning he engenders by means of the bicycle. It is for him the prime symbol of the Cartesian mind in its acrobatic relation of mind and body in precarious imbalance. This plight goes with a lineal progression that mimics the very form of purposeful and resourceful independence of action. For Beckett, the integral being is not the acrobat but the clown. The acrobat acts as a specialist, using only a limited segment of his faculties. The clown is the integral man who mimes the acrobat in an elaborate drama of incompetence. Beckett sees the bicycle as the sign and symbol of specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all interact and react, using all of our faculties at once. Humpty-Dumpty is the familiar example of the clown unsuccessfully imitating the acrobat. Just because all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again, it doesn't follow that electromagnetic automation