“They are creatures perfect enough to disquiet their creators with the possibility that these strange beings should one day cross, by means of their acquired speed, the narrow frontier within which intelligence confines instinct, trying in their turn to scale the heavens, to stifle their bewildered masters against breasts of bronze, and to render into their native dust the human clay that they once took for gods!”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1884