August 26, i ^97] 



NA TURE 



411 



is often unduly curtailed, to the great after-grief, in very many 

 cases, of the successful engineer, and not infrequently also of 

 the less successful engineer who, in some phases of his profes- 

 sional career, has been only too keenly alive to the self-reproach 

 and sense of inferiority which want of thoroughness or of time, 

 or of both, at school has brought upon him. 



But at some time the boy must leave school. Let us hope 

 that he does not aspire " to control the great forces of nature" ; 

 but if he does we must make the best we can of him. 



It is not desirable, at least so it appears to me, that even at 

 this stage his training should be specialised in view of the 

 particular branch of the profession or business he is likely to 

 follow. The fundamental principles of any branch of mechanical 

 engineering are broadly the fundamental principles of any branch 

 of the profession. I hesitate to speak of civil engineering as if 

 it were a separate branch, instead of being, as it really is, the 

 generic name of the profession ; but the training demanded for 

 the various branches of civil engineering in its narrower sense 

 is precisely the same as that required in its earlier stages for 

 mechanical engineering pure and simple. 



I shall make no attempt to review the large number of excel- 

 lent courses which are now available for the teaching of applied 

 .'•cience in relation to engineering. Experience of the results as 

 judged by the students who have come directly under my notice, 

 and examination of many calendars, has aroused various thoughts 

 concerning them, and this thought is perhaps uppermost : are we 

 not in some cases attempting at too early a stage the teachifig of 

 subjects instead of principles ? attempting at too early a stage 

 the teaching of subjects instead of principles? Complete sub- 

 jects, I mean, including the practical working of details which 

 will become the regular study of the student in the office or 

 works of an engineer. It certainly seems to me to be so. I do 

 not say that subject training of this kind at college may not be 

 useful ; but we have to consider whether it does not, for the 

 sake of some little anticipation of his office work, divert the 

 attention of the student from the better mastery of those prin- 

 ciples which it is so essential for him to grasp at the earliest 

 possible time, and which do not limit his choice in the battle of 

 life to any branch whatever of the profession or business of an 

 engineer, but which, on the contrary, qualify him better to 

 pursue with success whatever branches his inclination or his 

 opportunities or his means may suggest. Not one in a hundred 

 of us can hope to emulate the careers of exceptional men in our 

 profession, but it is sometimes useful to observe those careers, 

 and whenever we do so we find the very reverse of specialisa- 

 tion. The minds of such men are impregnated with the funda- 

 mental principles which we may call the common law of our 

 art ; it has happened that their practice has been large in certain 

 branches, and small or wanting in certain others ; but in any it 

 w ould have been equally successful. Of no class of men can it 

 be said with greater truth than of engineers that their standard 

 should be sound knowledge of the principles of many things 

 and of the practice of a few. 



There is some danger in the usual limitation of compulsory 

 subjects in examinations for certificates and degrees. When an 

 examination has to be passed subjects not made compulsory 

 are too often entirely neglected, however important to the 

 engineer ihey may be. A little learning is certainly not a dan- 

 gerous thing if within its limits it is sound, and every engineer 

 will in after life be grateful to those who in his student days 

 insisted upon his acquiring some knowledge of the principles of 

 such subjects as electricity and chemistry. At present it too 

 often happens that, unless an engineering student is predestined 

 to practise electrical work or some chemical industry, he begins 

 life as an engineer with no knowledge of the principles of either 

 the one or the t)ther, and chiefly as a result of their neglect for 

 the sake of certain subjects made compulsory for the test he has 

 had to pass, which subjects too occasionally include the highly 

 specialised favourites of a particular professor or verge too com- 

 pletely on perlccted details which, I venture to think, cannot be 

 rightly mastered in schools. It is natural and right that each 

 professor of a principal subject should seek to make the best, 

 Irom his own particular standpoint, of every student who attends 

 his lectures or his laboratories ; and the professor of a compul- 

 sory subject cannot be expected to encourage the inclusion, \\\ a 

 course already overcrowded, of secondary or collateral subjects 

 which are dealt with by other professors ; while, on the other 

 hand, the professors of secondary subjects, such as electricity or 

 chemistry, not unnaturally value chiefly the students who make 

 those subjects their principal work. 



NO 1452, VOL. 56] 



For these reasons it appears to me that a certain very moderate 

 standard in all such subjects should be made compulsory if a 

 certificate of proficiency, whether by degree or otherwise, is to 

 be given in engineering or even in physical science. 



In the teaching of mathematics within the Victorian Age a 

 considerable change has taken place, and I plead for still a little 

 more change in the same direction where the training of the 

 engineer is concerned. Mathematics, as taught in our public 

 schools — let us say for the Cambridge University Tripos — may 

 be all that is claimed for it as a mode of mental culture ; but of 

 kindred mental culture the engineer must necessarily have more 

 than most men, and much might therefore be omitted which, to 

 him at least, has only an abstract value, to the great advantage 

 of his mastery over those branches which at once train his mind 

 and give point and direct utility to his solutions. 



In America I understand that a college course of engineering 

 generally includes workshop practice designed to supersede the 

 old system of apprenticeship to a mechanical engineer. This 

 fact and other important differences between the English and 

 American practice have only lately come to my knowledge, and 

 before they did so the substance of this address had been written. 

 It might, in some particulars, require modification as applied to 

 Canada, biat it remains the result of my observations concerning 

 the conditions of engineering education which obtain in the 

 mother country. 



A few words now in relation to that physical and mental 

 training gained laboriously, and somewhat wastefully as I think, 

 at the joiner's bench, in the fitting and turning shops, the foundry 

 and the forge, during the old course of mechanical engineering 

 apprenticeship. I am convinced that the kind of knowledge 

 which comes of thoughtful chipping and filing and turning and 

 forging, though only applied to a few of the materials with which 

 in after life the engineer has to deal, are quite as important as 

 tables of density and strength to his future sense of Tightness in 

 constructive design. The use of such work is not merely to 

 teach one the parts and combinations of any particular machine ; 

 in a still higher degree it is the insensible mastery of a much 

 more subtle knowledge or mental power, the applicat ion of the 

 senses of sight and touch and force, it may be of other senses 

 also, to the determination of the nature of things. (I am not 

 going to apologise for referring to the sense of force. The vexed 

 question of its separate existence appears to me to have been 

 settled fourteen years ago by Lord Kelvin in his address at 

 Birmingham on " the six gateways of knowledge," and I may 

 well leave it where he left it.) I should altogether fail to 

 describe adequately what this mastery means. It appears to me 

 to be inscrutable. The value and nature of the power can only 

 be appreciated by those who have experienced it, and who have 

 felt its defect in those of their assistants or in others who do 

 not possess it. 



But the great workshop training has still further advantages. 

 The apprentice is surrounded by skilled workers from whose 

 example, if he is wise, he learns a great deal ; and apart from 

 this it is no small profit to have rubbed against the British 

 workman, to have discovered what manner of man he is, and to 

 comprehend how little the world knows of his best parts. The 

 whole time spent in large engineering works cannot, however, 

 be equally beneficial ; the apprentice must take the work as it 

 comes ; the most interesting or instructive portions cannot be 

 reserved for him, and he often feels that some of his time is 

 being well-nigh wasted. 



A few years ago I should not have thought it practicable use- 

 fully to substitute for such a course anything that could be 

 undertaken in a student's workshop, however organised ; but 

 the impossibility, in many cases, of including such experience 

 without neglecting something equally important has led me to 

 view with satisfaction the introduction of workshop training into 

 certain schools of applied science in England. Such a change 

 cannot, of course, carry with it all the advantages of experience 

 in the great workshop and of contact with its workers, but those 

 advantages which it does retain may be secured in a shorter 

 time where there is no commercial interest to be served. 



In Canada and the United States, as I have already said, the 

 principle of the student's workshop has been carried considerably 

 further. Compared with the old country, I believe the number 

 of young assistant engineers who in proportion to the number of 

 their chiefs can find employment in America is much greater, 

 and that it would be practically impossible for the British system 

 of pupilage to be generally employed. Here, therefore, the 

 whole college training of an engineer is designed to fit him fo 



