TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 711 



Section G.— ENGINEERING. 



President of the Section — Professor John Peret, D.Sc, F.R.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



This Section has had sixty-six Presidents, all difierent types of engineer. As 

 each has had perfect freedom in choosing the subject for his Address, and each has 

 known of the rule that Presidential Addresses are not subject to debate after- 

 wards,* and as, being an engineer, he has always been a man of originality, of 

 course he has always chosen a subject outside his own work. An engineer knows 

 that the great inventions, the great suggestions of change in any profession, come 

 from outsiders. Lawyers seem like fish out of water when trying to act as law- 

 makers. The radical change that some of us hope to see before we die in the con- 

 struction of locomotives wiU certainly not come from a locomotive superintendent 

 who cannot imagine a locomotive which is not somehow a lineal descendant of 

 the Rocket. 



Hence it is that in almost every case the President of this Section has devoted 

 a small or large part of his Address to the subject of the education of engineers. I 

 grant that every President has devoted his life to the education of one engineer — 

 himself — and it is characteristic of engrineers that their professional education 

 proceeds throughout the whole of their lives. Perhaps of no other men can this 

 be 8'aid so completely. To utilise the forces of Nature, to combat Nature, to com- 

 prehend Nature as a child comprehends its mother, this is the pleasure and the 

 pain of the engineer.'- A mere scientific man analyses Nature : takes a phenomenon, 

 dissects it into its simpler elements, and investigates these elements separately in 

 his laboratory. The engineer cannot do this. He must take Nature as she is, in 

 all her exasperating complexity. He must understand one of Nature's problems as 

 a whole. He must have all the knowledge of the scientific man, and ever so much 

 more. He uses the methods of the scientific man, and adds to them methods of his 

 own. The name given to these scientific methods of his own or their results is 

 sometimes ' common-sense,' sometimes 'character,' or ' individuality,' or ' faculty,' 

 or * business ability,' or ' instinct.' They come to him through a very wide experi- 

 ence of engineering processes, of acquaintance with things and men. No school or 



' The Committees of Sections G and L having arranged a discussion on ' The Edu- 

 cation of Engineers,' and this Address being regarded as opening the discussion, the 

 rule is not in force this year. 



- Of all the unskilled labour of the present day, surely that of the modern poet is 

 the most grotesque. How much more powerful and powerless man seems to us now ; 

 how much more wonderful is the universe than it was to the ancients 1 Yet our 

 too learned poets prefer to copy and recopy the sentiments of the ancients rather 

 than try to see the romance which fills the lives of engineers and scientific men 

 with joy. 



