712 REPORT— 1902. 



college can do more than prepare a young man for this higher engineering educa- 

 tion which lasts through life. Without it a man follows only rule of thumh, like 

 a sheep following the bell-wether, or else he lets his inventiveness or love of theory 

 act the tyrant. 



When a man has become a great engineer, and he is asked how it happened, what 

 his education has been, how young engineers ought to be trained, as a rule it is a 

 question that he is least able to answer, and yet it is a question that he is most ready 

 to answer. lie sees that he benefited greatly by overcoming certain difficulties in 

 his life ; and forgetting that every boy will have difhculties enough of his own, for- 

 getting that although a few difficulties may be good for discipline many difficulties 

 may be overwhelming, forgetting also that he himself is a very exceptional man, he 

 insists upon it that those difficulties which were personal to himself ought to be 

 thrown in the path of every boy. It often happens that he is a man who is accus- 

 tomed to think that early education can only be given through ancient classics. He 

 forgets the dulness, the weariness of his schooldays. Whatever pleasure he had in 

 youth — pleasure mainly due to the fact that the average Anglo-Saxon boy invents 

 infinite ways of escaping school drudgery — he somehow connects with the fact that 

 he had to learn classics. Being an exceptional boy, he was not altogether stupefied, 

 and did not altogether lose his natural inclination to know something of his own 

 language ; and he is in the habit of thinking that he learnt English through Latm, 

 and that ancient classics are the best mediums through which an English boy can 

 study anything.* 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 mathematics and abstract dynamics as 

 absolutely necessary 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 mathe- 

 matical 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 men- 

 tion 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 profession — if he does not love it. We all 

 know the young man who thinks of engineering things during office hours and 



' The very people who talk so much of learning English through Latin neglect 

 in the most curious ways those Platt-Deutsch languages, Dutch and Scandinavian, a 

 knowledge of which is ten times more valuable in the study of what is becoming the 

 speech of the world. And how they do scorn Lowland Scotch 1 



