860 REPORT— 1887. 



necessary for this work have come. Since 1867 the Owens College has received 

 gifts and bequests from engineers, including those of highest standing in the neigh- 

 bourhood, of upwards of 160,000/. ; in the same way at Sheffield and at Leeds, 

 where, as is well known, an engineering school lias just been founded b}' Sir John 

 Hawkshaw and the engineers of the town, and again at Liverpool. 



It cannot for one moment be doubted that this movement has been brought 

 about by the conviction of the necessity of an education which, in its subjects and 

 methods of teaching, is much more closely related than was the older svstem of 

 the Universities, to the actual work which the students may eventually be called 

 upon to undertake ; that it is in fact evidence of the appreciation, by those having 

 the greatest experience, of the necessity of higher scienti6c training for engineers. 

 This is what engineering schools during theii' struggle for existence have endeavoured 

 to supply. And in spite of the danger which seems to beset all schools as 

 they become older, of falling into the academic or pure — not because it is the 

 most desirable to be learnt, but because it is by far the easiest to teach — -in spite 

 of this danger, such in this case is the pressure from without, that it may be hoped 

 the .schools of engineering and applied science may be kept up to the mark, both in 

 extending our knowledge of the laws and principles which more immediately 

 underlie the results of practical experience in art, and in teaching the methods of 

 most useful application ; and that while encouraged to offer every inducement to 

 the attainment of a sound knowledge of the principles, they will not be allowed to 

 fall into the fatally easy eiTors of cari-ying the abstractions of this science outside 

 all possible application, or blocking the way by the insistance on impossible pre- 

 liminary attainments in mathematics and pure science. 



To be hailed as one of the greatest inducements to keeping alive in engineering 

 schools a real .scientific interest in the practical work which is going on around 

 them is the introduction of what are now called engineering laboratories, in which 

 students may familiarise themselves with the actual subjects for which the theo- 

 retical work is undertaken, and may have placed before them in their most naked 

 forms the data and mechanical actions on which practical achievements depend, and 

 in addition be taught the use of all those instruments and methods of measurement 

 which it is one of the first objects of these laboratories to extend and to perfect, 

 and which measurements are now, as the result of a better knowledge of principles, 

 rapidly displacing tlie older methods of arriving at conclusions in engineering. 



It is to our Continental neighbours that we principally owe the origination of 

 these laboratories as a means of research, but, as a system of instruction distinct 

 from a workshop it owes much to Professor Kennedy, who was, I believe, the first 

 to introduce the testing machine and regular engine trials as part of tlie regular 

 course of instruction fcr students in engineering, under the title of a laboratory course. 

 The want of such a course must, however, it would seem, have been severely 

 felt, to judge by the rapidity with which Professor Kennedy's example has been 

 followed in almost all the engineering .scliools in the country. 



It is true that as adjuncts to academic institutions these laboratories can hardly 

 be said to have passed the experimental stage, and it evidently remains to be seen 

 whether when the present arrears of outstanding questions in engineering science 

 are worked up. and the courses of instruction become .stereotyped, sufficient variety 

 of work will be found to justify the expense which, both as regards qualified 

 mstructors and maintenance of apparatus, mu.st, as compared with the number of 

 students receiving instruction, be greater than is general with academic instruction. 

 At present, however, thanks to the liberality of engineers and their friends, there 

 seems no gTound for fear, each new laboratory being furnished with more complete 

 and expensive apparatus than the last. During the erection and fitting of the 

 A\Tiitworth Laboratory in Owens College, which is only now on the verge of com- 

 pletion, it has been very impressing to see the goodwill .shown toward the work by 

 everybody who has had to do with it ; the ready help of engineers of the greatest 

 experience, like Mr. Rambottom and Mr. Robinson, who have spared neither time 

 nor trouble in giving it the benefit of their experience ; also by those who have 

 undertaken the construction of the appliances, iiarticularly Mr. William Mather, 

 of Salford Iron "Works, where neither trouble nor money has been considered in 



