14 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Outside of the universities, a half century ago, things were 

 little or no better. There was a small number of schools of 

 engineering and a still smaller number of schools of chemical 

 technology, but they did not form part of a large scheme of busi- 

 ness training as a whole for the nation. The trained engineers 

 of the first half of the nineteenth century were, as a rule, 

 engineers trained in military schools. Most of the civil en- 

 gineers, as we called them by contrast in those days, had learned 

 their profession in the field. Most of the technologists had 

 learned it in the shop. Now, all of this has changed during the 

 fifty years of the life of the Academy, and changed radically. 

 Our universities have developed scientific study in all their 

 departments, and especially so in their schools of medicine and 

 philosophy. And side by side with these universities, schools 

 or faculties there have grown up colleges of engineering and 

 technology, sometimes in connection with the university, some- 

 times outside of it, which lay a scientific foundation for a calling 

 that only a few years ago was thought to need no scientific 

 foundation at all. For the world has found a place for the 

 scientific expert in every line and is inclined to regard as the 

 best school, not the one that has the most students, not even the 

 one that can give the best general education, but that which in 

 the different lines can train and furnish scientific experts of the 

 highest rank and most varied knowledge. 



For civilized nations have at last come to the conclusion that 

 the old supposed antagonism between theory and practice was 

 a misleading conception, and the habit of drawing a sharp line 

 between the theoretical man and the practical man was a perni- 

 cious one. 



Fifty years ago a man who had obtained all his knowledge of 

 his business by his own experience was habitually proud of the 

 fact; he was, as the phrase went in those days, a self-made man 

 who spent most of his time in worshipping his creator. (Laugh- 

 ter.) He counted it a matter of superiority that he knew nothing 

 except what he had found out himself and taught himself. 

 Today it is recognized that every man can learn from the theorist 



