WILLIAM SIEMENS, F.R.S 65 



Engineers ? Is telegraph engineering not a branch of civil 

 engineering, and do not all our proceedings therefore fall within 

 the legitimate sphere of action of the Institution of Civil Engi- 

 neers ? Or if we meet with difficult questions in physical or 

 mathematical science, is not the Royal Society or Section A of 

 the British Association open for us to discuss them, or may we 

 not go before the Institution of Mechanical Engineers with any 

 purely mechanical question ? Is it desirable, indeed, it may be 

 urged, to take a branch from the parent stem and to cultivate it 

 separately ; shall we not degenerate thereby into " specialists," or 

 what may be called " fractional quantities of scientific men," and 

 this in the face of the patent fact that the further we advance 

 in scientific knowledge (whether pure or applied) the more clearly 

 we perceive the intimate connection between its different branches, 

 and the impossibility of cultivating one without constantly re- 

 verting to the others. 



In answer to such allegations we may fairly assert that we do 

 not intend to become " specialists " in the narrow sense of wishing 

 to confine the range of our knowledge to the phenomena and 

 appliances which have an immediate application to our professional 

 objects. We are, on the contrary, sensible to the fact that in 

 order to master those special branches of knowledge thoroughly 

 we shall have to travel into adjacent fields and build our practice 

 upon the wildest possible scientific foundation. But our time is 

 limited, and, although the great principles of nature may be 

 understood generally by one person, their applications are infinite, 

 and all we may hope to do is to attain to a general scientific basis, 

 and with it to devote our energies vigorously to the details of one 

 or two branches of applied science. 



If it is impossible for one man to master the special knowledge 

 accumulated in different branches of engineering science, it would 

 be equally impossible for one society to cultivate all those branches 

 in detail ; thus the Royal Society can only entertain questions 

 involving general principles of science, and is obliged to leave 

 questions of exhaustive research to special societies ; questions of 

 minute chemical investigation are assigned to the Chemical 

 Society ; questions regarding the orbits of celestial bodies to the 

 Astronomical Society ; and by the same rule of limitation the 

 Royal Society would refuse to receive for instance a paper on 



VOL. III. F 



