5.3% 
———— Ff 
Purser, now the President of Section A, were professors at this 
College that we call them great. All the scientific men of the 
world are agreed to call these men very great indeed. To come 
in contact with any of them, even for a little while, as a student, 
altered for ever one’s attitude to Nature. It was not that they 
gave us information, knowledge, facts. The syllabuses of their 
courses of study were nothing like so perfect as that of the 
smallest German polytechnic. And yet if a youth with a liking 
for physical science had gone to a German Gymnasium to the 
age of nineteen, and had become a walking encyclopaedia on 
leaving one’s polytechnic at the age of twenty-four, the course 
of that life-study would not have done for him as much good as 
was done by a month’s contact with one of these men. People 
call it ‘personal magnetism” and think there is something 
occult about it. In truth, they revealed to the student that he 
himself was a man, that mere learning was unimportant, that 
one’s own observation of some common phenomenon might 
lead to important results unknown to the writers of books. 
They made one begin to think for oneself for the first time. 
Let me give an example of how the thing worked. 
James Thomson was known to me as the son of the author of 
my best mathematical books, but more particularly as the man 
who had first used Carnot’s principle in combination with the 
discovery of Joule, and I often wondered why Rankine and 
Clausius and Kelvin got all the credit of the discovery of the 
second law of thermodynamics. Men think of this work of his 
merely as having given the first explanation of regelation 
of ice and the motion of glaciers. He was known to me as 
the inventor of the Thomson Turbine and Centrifugal Pump 
and Jet Pump. His name was to be found here and there in all 
my text-books, always in connection with some thoroughly 
well-worked-out investigation, as it is to be found in all good 
text-books now; for wherever he left a subject, there that 
subject has remained until this day ; nobody has added to it or 
found a mistake in it. He was to mea very famous man, and 
yet he treated me as a fellow-student. One of his early lectures 
was about flowing water, and he told us of a lot of things he had 
observed, which also I had observed without much thought ;and he 
showed how these simple observations completely destroyed the 
value of everything printed in every text-book on the subject of 
water flowing over gauge-notches, even in the otherwise very 
perfect Rankine. I felt how stupid [ had been in not having 
drawn these conclusions myself, but in truth till then I had 
never ventured for a moment to criticise anything in a book. I 
have-been a cautious critic of all statements in text-books ever 
since. If any engineer wants to read what is almost the most 
instructive paper that has ever been written for engineers, let 
him refer to the latest paper written by James Thomson on this 
subject.!. The reasoning there given was given to me in lectures 
in this very room in 1868, and had been given to students for 
many years previous. 
Again, soon afterwards, he let me see that although T had 
often looked at the whirlpool in a basin of water when the 
central bottom hole is open, and although I had read Edgar 
Allen Poe’s mythical description of the Maélstrom, I had been 
very much too careless in my observation. Among other things, 
Thomson had observed that particles of sand gradually passed 
along the bottom towards the hole. When he found out the 
cause of this, it led him at once to several discoveries of great 
importance. Indeed, the study of this simple observation gave 
rise to all his work on (1) What occurs at bends of pipes and 
channels, and why rivers in alluvial plains bend more and more ; 
(2) The explanation of the curious phenomena that accompany 
great forest fires; (3) The complete theory of the great wind 
circulation of the earth, published in its final form as the 
Bakerian Lecture of the Royal Society in 1892. 
But why go on? He taught me to see that the very com- 
monest phenomenon had still to reveal important secrets to the 
understanding eye and brain, and that no man is a true student 
unless he is a discoverer. And so it was with Kelvin and 
Andrews. Their names were great before the world, and yet 
they treated one as a fellow-student. Is any expenditure of 
money too large if we can obtain great men like these for our 
Engineering Colleges? Money is wanted for apparatus and 
more particularly for men, and we spend what little we have on 
bricks and mortar ! 
The memory of a man so absolutely honest as Prof. James 
Thomson was compels me to say here that I was in an 
exceptionally fit state to benefit by contact with him, for I 
NATURE 
1 Brit. Assoc. Report, 1876, pp. 243-266. 
NO. 1717, VOL. 66] 
[SEPTEMBER 25, 1902 
hungered for scientific information.! I do not think that there 
was so much benefit for the average student whose early 
education had almost unfitted him for engineering studies. To 
work quantitatively with apparatus is good for all students, but it 
is absolutely necessary for the average student, and, as I said 
before, there was no apparatus. Also the average student can- 
not learn from lectures merely, but needs constant tutorial 
teaching, and the Professor had no assistant. 
Anybody who wants to know what kind of engineering school 
there ought to be in such a college as this can see excellent 
specimens (sometimes several in one town) in Glasgow, Bir- 
mingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, 
Nottingham, Edinburgh and other great cities. There the 
fortunate manufacturers have given many hundreds of thousands 
of pounds for instruction in applied science (engineering). In 
America the equipment of such schools is much more thorough 
and there are large staffs of teachers, for fortunate Americans 
have contributed tens of millions of pounds for this kind of 
assistance to the rising generation. Germany and Switzerland 
compete with America in such preparation for supremacy in 
manufacture and engineering, and nearly every country in the 
world is more and more recognising its importance as they see 
the great inventions of Englishmen like Faraday and Perkin 
and Hughes and Swan developed almost altogether in those 
countries which believe in education. Even one hundred 
thousand pounds would provide Queen’s College, Belfast, with 
the equipment of an engineering school worthy of its traditions 
and position, and Belfast is a city in which many large business 
fortunes have been made. 
It is interesting to note that the present arrangements of the 
Royal University of Ireland, with which this College is affiliated, 
are such that most of the successful graduates in engineering of 
Queen’s University would now be debarred from taking the 
degree. Even in London University, Latin is not a compulsory 
subject for degrees in science; Ireland has taken a step back- 
wards towards the Middle Ages at the very time when other 
countries are stepping forward. 
Well equipped schools of applied science are getting to be 
numerous, but I am sorry to say that only a few of the men 
who leave them every year are really likely to become good 
engineers. The most important reason for this is that the 
students who enter them come usually from the public schools ; 
they cannot write English; they know nothing of English 
subjects ; they do not care to read anything except the sporting 
news in the daily papers; they cannot compute; they know 
nothing of natural science ; in fact, they are quite deficient in 
that kind of general education which every man ought to have. 
I am not sure that such ignorant boys would not benefit more 
by entering works at once than by entering a great engineering 
school. They cannot follow the College courses of instruction 
at all, in spite of having passed the entrance examination by 
cramming. Whereas after a while they do begin to understand 
what goes on in a workshop; and if they have the true engineer's 
spirit, their workshop observation will greatly correct the faults 
due to stupid schoolwork.” 
Perhaps I had better state plainly my views as to what 
general education is best for the average English boy. The 
public schools of England teach English through Latin, a 
survival of the time when only special boys were taught at 
all, and when there was only one language in which people 
wrote. Now the average boy is also taught Latin, and when 
he leaves school for the army or any other pursuit open 
1Some of our most successful graduates went direct to works from the 
Model School, Belfast, and afterwards attended this College. No school in 
the British Islands could have given better the sort of general education 
which I recommend for all boys. English subjects were especially well 
taught, so that boys became fond of reading all manner of books: There 
were good classes in freehand and machine drawing, classes in chemistry and 
physics (at that time I believe that there were no such classes in any English 
public school), and the teaching of mathematics was good. Some of the 
masters started classes also under the Science and Art Department. _ Some 
of the masters had much individuality, and there was no outside examination 
to restrain it; there was only encouragement. Evidence has been given 
before a committee of the London School Board as to the excellence of the 
teaching at this school forty years ago. Foreign languages were not in the 
regular curriculum, but they could be studied by boys inclined that way > 
and in my opinion this is the position that all languages other than English 
ought to take in any British school. With such preparation a boy was eager 
and able to understand what went on in engineering works from his first day 
there. 
2 When I was young I remember that there were many agricultural 
colleges in Ireland ; they have all but one been failures. Why? Because 
the entering pupils were not prepared by early education to understand the 
instruction ; this had done as much as possible to unfit them. 
