374 AS UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT-V 



ished, each a model in its kind. But while many mechanics 

 praised them, they attracted no special attention from 

 New England authorities. On the other hand, an exhibit 

 of samples of work from the School of Technology of 

 Moscow, which had no merchantable value, many of the 

 pieces being of antiquated pattern, but of exquisite finish 

 and showily arranged, aroused great admiration among 

 sundry New England theorists ; even the head of the Mas- 

 sachusetts Institute of Technology, in enthusiastic maga- 

 zine articles, called the attention of the whole country to 

 them, and urged the necessity of establishing machine- 

 shops in connection with schools of science. The fact that 

 this had already been done, and better done, at Cornell, 

 was loftily ignored. Western New York seemed a Naza- 

 reth out of which no good could come. That same strain- 

 ing of the mind's eye toward the East, that same tendency 

 to provincialism which had so often afflicted Massachu- 

 setts, evidently prevented her wise men in technology 

 from recognizing any new departure west of them. 



At a later period I had occasion to make a final com- 

 ment on all this. Both as commissioner at the Paris Ex- 

 hibition and as minister to Russia, I came to know inti- 

 mately Wischniegradsky, who had been the head of the 

 Moscow School of Technology and afterward Russian 

 minister of finance. He spoke to me in the highest terms 

 of what original American methods had done for rail- 

 ways; and the climax was reached when the Moscow 

 methods, so highly praised by Boston critics, proved to be 

 utterly inadequate in training mechanical engineers to 

 furnish the machinery needed in Russia, and men from 

 the American schools, trained in the methods of Cornell, 

 sent over locomotives and machinery of all sorts for the 

 new Trans-Siberian Railway, of which the eastern termi- 

 nus was that very city of Moscow which enjoyed the 

 privileges so lauded and magnified by the Boston critics ! 

 Time has reversed their judgment : the combination of the 

 two systems, so ably and patiently developed by Director 

 Thurston, is the one which has happily prevailed. 



