EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



Vol. XXIV. February, 1911. No. 2. 



Half a century ago engineering attracted little attention. Then 

 only a small number of men followed this vocation, and there were 

 few institutions which gave instruction in the subject. It was not 

 until after the Civil War that men began to recognize the value of 

 technical training and to question the wisdom of compelling all 

 college students to spend so large a part of their time in a study of 

 dead languages and a dead past. Then followed the passage of the 

 Morrill Act, providing for colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts 

 throughout the Union. 



These institutions have been a great factor in the development of 

 engineering education. In 1909 there were, according to the report 

 of the Commissioner of Education, a total of 31,748 engineering stu- 

 dents in all the universities, colleges, and technical schools of the 

 United States. Of this total number, 17,892 were in the land-grant 

 colleges. These and other data show that the land-grant colleges 

 are training more than 56 per cent of all the engineering students of 

 the Nation. A hasty glance through the list of courses of these in- 

 stitutions shows that nearly all of these students are classified under 

 civil, mechanical, electrical, and mining, with a scattering jDertain- 

 ing to sanitary, structural, and other branches of engineering. 



The main activities of the land-grant colleges are concentrated 

 upon the training of civil, mechanical, electrical, and mining engi- 

 neers, in competition with a large number of State universities and 

 technical schools. In their etl'orts to train civil engineers for rail- 

 way corporations, mechanical engineers for manufacturers, and 

 hydro-electrical engineers for water companies, these institutions 

 are neglecting to train men for the engineering work of the farm 

 and the coinitry. The movement in that direction dat«s back but a 

 few years, and as yet only one of the 67 institutions, the Iowa State 

 College, offers a degree in agricultural engineering. Departments of 

 agricultural engineering and of farm mechanics have now been pro- 

 vided in about a dozen of the agricultural colleges, and the men in 

 charge of these departments are illustrating by their work the im- 

 portance of this subject as a branch of agricultural education. As 



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