314 ROBERT HEYWOOD FERNALD 



nearly concerns the business of life. All our industries would 

 cease were it not for that information which men begin to 

 acquire as they best may after their education is said to be 

 finished. And were it not for this information, that has 

 been from age to age accumulated and spread by unofficial 

 means, these industries would never have existed." It is 

 this very field that the engineering schools have filled and 

 are filling so acceptably to-day. Their wonderful growth has 

 exceeded all expectation, and the quality of their work 

 has made for them a position surpassed in importance by 

 no other educational development of the past century. No 

 finer tribute to the work of the engineering school can be 

 paid than the following from an address delivered by that 

 able and noted educator. Gen. Francis A. Walker, at McGill 

 university in 1893. 



''The growth of scientific and technical schools on this 

 continent during the past thirty years has savored of the 

 marvelous. 



"The notion that scientific work was something essen- 

 tially less fine and high and noble than the pursuit of rhetoric 

 and philosophy, Latin and Greek, was deeply seated in the 

 minds of the leading educators of America a generation ago. 

 And it has not even yet wholly yielded to the demonstration 

 offered by the admirable effects of the new education in train- 

 ing young men to be as modest and earnest, as sincere, manly 

 and pure, as broad and appreciative, as were the best prod- 

 ucts of the classical culture, and withal, more exact and 

 resolute and strong. We can hardly hope to see that in- 

 veterate prepossession altogether disappear from the minds 

 of those who have entertained it. Probably these good 

 men will have to be buried with more or less of their prej- 

 udices still wrapped about them; but from the new genera- 

 tion scientific and technical studies will encounter no such 

 obstruction, will suffer no such disparagement. 



'The practical uselessness, for any immediate purpose, 

 of a given subject of study may be no reason why it should 

 not be pursued; but, on the other hand, the high immediate 

 usefulness of a subject of study furnishes no ground from 

 which the educator of loftiest aims and purest ideals should 



