THE ENGINEERING MIND. 255 



of industry organizing his factory, the skilled workman himself, the 

 surgeon, the sea-captain each and all of these, with many other 

 representatives of human activity, are, at their best, endowed or equip- 

 ped with a common habit of thought more or less directly connected 

 with what Huxley called 'the architectural or engineering part of the 

 business.' In other words, the more or less distinctly pronounced 

 'note' of modern culture is a capacity for the recognition of the 

 universal in the particular or the reign of law in nature. 



Unquestionably, the intellectual training which leads to the for- 

 mation of the engineering mind, in its larger sense, affords a larger 

 scope and capacity for pure intellectual pleasure, as well as a more 

 permanent source of such pleasure, than is afforded, for instance, by 

 the popular resort to light fiction. The poetry of common tilings, 

 disclosed in enormous volume by the science of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, is familiar to many; but it is sealed to many more, not without 

 a certain measure of intellectual culture, by the lack of the special 

 training which forms the scientific habit of thought. 



But, apart from the value of the engineering habit of mind re- 

 garded from the point of view of intellectual culture for its own sake, 

 the question is at last being recognized with widespread interest as 

 one of importance to nations struggling for industrial supremacy or 

 stability. In Great Britain particularly, thanks in part to the large 

 attention it received at the September meeting of the British Asso- 

 ciation not only at the hands of the president, Professor Dewar, but 

 from the engineering and educational sections, the question is up 

 for very general discussion in the country and, it is to be hoped, for 

 progressive settlement. The incompetence displayed so often by 

 British officers in South Africa has driven the British people to a 

 severe stock taking, and that stock taking has brought into prominence 

 a fact, more or less fully recognized by a wise minority from the time 

 of Dr. Arnold of Bugby to the present day, namely, that the traditional 

 methods of education in England are not conducive to the formation 

 of trained habits of scientific thought. 



Professor Perry, the president of the engineering section of the 

 British Association, has been insisting for some time, and insisted 

 again at the Belfast meeting, that the great fault of the traditional 

 method is the manner in which mathematics is taught. Mensuration 

 is dissociated too sharply from geometry, and geometry too sharply from 

 algebra. That is to say, contrary to the example of Germany and 

 France for nearly a century and to the more recent example of the 

 American universities, the employment of the modern proofs of 

 geometry has been resisted in favor of the more cumbersome and, to 

 the average young mind, the far more difficult proofs employed by 



