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Neat! Had never heard of him, but this guy's works remind me of what an early thinker on "complexity science" might sound like, who in modern times might be someone who gravitated toward the Santa Fe Institute....
He's got another short story where he analogizes human social networks to signals travelling over telegraph, which feels like a really insightful parallel to see at the time, when no one was thinking about generalized properties of networks
saw it coming, but not a bad read. the 1884 makes it even more interesting, that they were thinking of this stuff then as well
It reminded me of "Darwin Among the Machines" (1863) which also surprised me at how "modern" it seemed.
'On the Origin of Species' was published in 1859. I suspect that a story like this was much more likely after that date than before.
One of the consequences of aging and learning is that my concept of the modern has expanded into the past faster than it advances with the passage of time.
There are some authors who truly seem like people out of their time, like Verne or Olaf Stapleton.