SEPTEMBER 25, 1902] 
The cleverest men of our time have been brought up on the 
classics, and so the engineer who cannot even quote correctly a 
tag from the Latin grammar, who never knew anything of 
classical literature, insists upon it that a classical education is 
essential for all men. He forgets the weary hours he spent 
getting off Euclid and the relief it was to escape from the 
class-room not quite stupefied, and he advocates the study of 
pure mathemathics and abstract dynamics as absolutely neces- 
sary for the training of the mind of every young engineer. I 
have known the ordinary abominable system of mathematical 
study to be advocated by engineers who, because they had 
passed through it themselves, had really got to loathe all kinds 
of mathematics higher than that of the grocer or housekeeper. 
They said that mathematics had trained their minds, but they 
did not need it in their profession. There is no profession which 
so much requires a man to have the mathematical tool always 
ready for use on all sorts of problems, the mathematical habit 
of thought the one most exercised by him ; and yet these men 
insist upon it that they can get all their calculations done for 
them by mathematicians paid so much a week. If they really 
thought about what they were saying, it would be an expression 
of the greatest contempt for all engineering computation and 
knowledge. He was pitchforked into works with no knowledge 
of mathematics, or dynamics, or physics, or chemistry, and, 
worse still, ignorant of the methods of study which a study of 
these things would have produced ; into works where there was 
no man whose duty it was to teach an apprentice ; and because 
he, one in a thousand, has been successful, he assures us that 
this pitchforking process is absolutely necessary for every young 
engineer. He forgets that the average boy leaves an English 
school with no power to think for himself, with a hatred for 
books, with less than none of the knowledge which might help 
him to understand what he sees, and he has learnt what is called 
mathematics in such a fashion that he hates the sight of an 
algebraic expression all his life after. 
I do not want to speak of boys in general. I want only to 
speak of the boy who may become an engineer, and before 
speaking of his training I want to mention his essential natural 
qualification—that he really wishes to become an engineer. I 
take it to be a rule to which there are no exceptions that no 
boy ought to enter a profession—or, rather, to continue in a pro- 
fession—if he does not love it. We all know the young man 
who thinks of engineering things during office hours and 
never thinks of them outside office hours. We know how his 
fond mother talks of her son as an engineer who, with a little 
more family influence and personal favour, and if there was not 
so much competition in the profession, would do so well. It is 
true, family influence may perhaps get such a man a better 
position, but he will never be an engineer. He is not fit even 
to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water to engineers. Love 
for his profession keeps a man alive to its interests all his time, 
although, of course, it does not prevent his taking an interest in 
all sorts of other things as well; but it is only a professional 
problem that warms him through with enthusiasm. I think we 
may assume that there never yet was an engineer worth his salt 
who was not fond of engineering, and so I shall speak only 
of the education of the young man who is likely to be fond of 
engineering. 
How are we to detect this fondness ina boy? I thirk that 
if the general education of all boys were of the rational kind 
which I shall presently describe, there would be no great diffi- 
culty ; but asthe present academic want of system is likely to 
continue for some time, it is well to consider things as they are. 
Mistakes must be made, and the parent who tries during the 
early years of his offspring to find out by crafty suggestion what 
line his son is likely to wish to follow will just as probably do 
evil by commission as the utterly careless parent is likely to do 
evil by omission. He is like the botanical enthusiast who digs 
up plants to see how they are getting on. But in my experience 
the Anglo-Saxon boy can stand a very great deal of mismanage- 
ment without permanent hurt, and it can do no kind of boy any 
very great harm to try him on engineering for a while. Even 
R. L. Stevenson, whose father seems to have been very per- 
sistent indeed in trying to make an engineer of him against his 
will, does not seem, to a Philistine like myself, to have been 
really hurt as a literary man through his attendance on Fleeming 
Jenkins’ course at Edinburgh—on the contrary, indeed. It 
may be prejudice, but I have always felt that there is no great 
public person of whom I have ever read who would not have 
benefited by the early training which is suitable for an engineer. 
NO. 1717, VOL. 06] 
NATURE 
53! 
I am glad to see that Mr. Wells, whose literary fame, great as 
it is, is still on the increase, distinguishes the salt of the earth 
or saviours of society from the degraded, useless, luxurious, 
pleasure-loving people doomed to the abyss by their having had 
the training of engineers and by their possessing the engineer’s 
methods of thinking. 
It may be that there are some boys of great genius fo whom 
all physical science or application of science is hateful. I have 
been told that this is so, and if so I still think that only gross 
mismanagement of a youthful nature can have produced such 
detestation. For such curious persons, engineering experience 
is, of course, quite unsuitable. I call them ‘‘ curious” because 
every child’s education in very early years is one in the methods 
of the study ol physica Iscience ; it is Nature’s own method of 
training, which proceeds successfully until it is interfered with by 
ignorant teachers who check all power of observation and the 
natural desire of every boy to find out things for himself. If he 
asks a question, he is snubbed; if he observes Nature as a 
loving student, he is said to be lazy and a dunce, and is pun- 
ished as being neglectful of school work. Unprovided with 
apparatus, he makes experiments in his own way, and he is said 
to be destructive and full of mischief. But however much we 
try to make the wild ass submit to bonds and the unicorn to 
abide by the crib, however bullied and beaten into the average 
schoolboy type, I cannot imagine any healthy boy suffering after- 
wards by part of a course of study suitable for engineers, for all 
such study must follow Nature’s own system of observation and 
experiment. Well, whether or not a mistake has been made, I 
shall assume the boy to be likely to love engineering, and we 
have to consider how he ought to be prepared for his profession. 
I want to say at the outset that I usually care only to speak of 
the average boy, the boy usually said to be stupid, ninety-five 
per cent. of all boys. Of the boy said to be exceptionally 
clever I need not speak much. Even if he is pitchforked into 
works immediately on leaving a bad school, it will not be long 
before he chooses his own course of study and follows it, what- 
ever course may have been laid down for him by others. I 
recollect that when in 1863 I attended an evening class held in 
the Model School, Belfast, under the Scienceand Art Department, 
on Practical Geometry and Mechanical Drawing, there was a young 
man attending it who is now well knownas the Right Honourable 
William J. Pirrie. He had found out for himsel! that he needed 
a certain kind of knowledge if he was to escape from mere rule- 
of-thumb methods in shipbuilding work ; it could at that time 
be obtained nowhere in the North of Ireland except at that class, 
and of course he attended the class. For forty two years the 
Science and Art Department, which has recently doubled its 
already great efficiency, has been giving chances of this kind 
to every clever young man in the country, from long before any 
Physical Science was taught in any English public school.t The 
one essential thing for the exceptional boy is that he shall find 
within his reach chances to take advantage of; chances of 
learning ; chances of practice ; and, over and above all, chances 
of meeting great men. It takes me off my subjecta little, but I 
should Jike here to illustrate this matter from my own personal 
experience. 
I had already been an apprentice for four years at the Lagan 
Foundry when I entered Queen’s College for a course of Civil 
Engineering. I suppose that there never was on this earth a 
college so poorly equipped for a course of engineering study. 
Even the lecture room—this lecture room in which you are now 
sitting—was borrowed from the Physics Professor. There was 
a narrow passage, ironically called a ‘‘ Drawing Room,” and 
this was the only space reserved for engineering in a town 
whose engineering work was even then very important. There 
were some theodolites and levels and chains for surveying, but 
nothing else in the way of apparatus. But there was as Pro- 
fessor a man of very great individuality ; he acted as President 
of this Section twenty-eight years ago. I can hardly express 
my obligations to Prof. James Thomson. It was my good for- 
tune to bea pupil both of this great man and of his younger 
brother, Lord Kelvin, as well as of Dr. Andrews. Itis not 
because these three men were born in Belfast that we here call 
them great. It is not because Tait, late of Edinburgh, and 
1 T once stated that my workshop at Clifton College in 1871 was the first 
school workshop in England. I understand that this isa mistake ; there had 
been a work hop at Rossall for some years. But I believe I am right in 
saying that my physical laboratory at Clifton was the first school laboratory 
in England. ‘These ideas were not mine; they were those of the Head- 
master, now the Bishop of Hereford. 
