TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 725 



Not only do I think that every teacher in an engineering college ought to have 

 some acquaintance with engineering, hut it seems to me equally important to 

 allow a professor of engineering, who ought, above all things, to be a practical 

 engineer, to keep in touch with his profession. A man who is not competing with 

 other engineers in practical work very quickly becomes antiquated in his know- 

 ledge: the designing work in his drawing-office is altogether out of date; he 

 lectures about old difficulties which are troubles no longer ; his pupils have no 

 enthusiasm in their work because it is merely academic and lifeless ; even when 

 he is a man distinguished for important work in the past his students have that 

 kind of disrespect for his teaching which makes it useless to them. If there is 

 fear that too much well-paid professional work will prevent efficiency in teachino- 

 there is no great difficulty in applying a remedy. °' 



Onemost important fact to be borne in mind is that efficient teachers cannot 

 be obtained at such poor salaries as are now given. An efficient labourer is worthy 

 of his hire ; an inefficient labourer is not worthy of any hire, however small. 

 Again, there is a necessity for three times as many teachers as are usually pro- 

 vided in England. The average man is in future to be really educated, this 

 means very much more personal attention, and from thoughtful teachers. Is 

 England prepared to face the problem of technical education in the only way which 

 can lead to success, prepared to pay a proper price for the real article ? If not, 

 she must be prepared to see the average man remaining uneducated. 



Advocacy of teaching of the kind that was given at Finsbury is often met by 

 the opposition not only of pure mathematicians and academic teachers, but I am 

 sorry to say also of engineers. The average engineer not merely looks askance at, 

 he IS really opposed to the college training of engineers, and I think, on the' 

 whole, that he has much justification for his views. University degrees in 

 engineering science are often conferred upon students who follow an academic 

 course, in which they learn little except how to pass examinations. The graduate 

 of to-day, even, does not often possess the three powers to which I have referred. 

 He is not fond of reading, and therefore he has no imagination, and the idea of an 

 engineer without imagination is as absurd as Teufelsdroch's notion of a cast-iron 

 king. He cannot really compute, in spite of all his mathematics, and he is absurdly 

 innocent of the methods of the true student of Nature. This kind of labelled 

 scientific engineer is being manufactured now in bulk because there is a money 

 value attached to a degree. He is not an engineer in any sense of the word, and 

 does not care for engineering, but he sometimes gets employment in technical 

 colleges. He is said to teach when he is really only impressing upon deluded 

 pupils the importance of formulae, and that whatever is printed in books must be 

 true. The real young engineer, caught in this eddy, will no doubt find his way 

 out of it, for the healthy experience of the workshop will bring back his common- 

 sense. For the average pupil of such graduates there is no help. If he enters 

 works,_ he knows but little more than if he had gone direct from scTiool. He is 

 still without the three qualifications which are absolutely necessary for a young 

 engineer. He is fairly certain to be a nuisance in the works and to try another 

 profession at the end of his pupilage. But if it is his fathers business he can 

 make a show of knowing something about it, and he is usually called an engineer. 

 Standardisation in an industry usually means easier and cheaper and better 

 manufacture, and a certain amount of it must be good even in engineering, but 

 when we see a great deal of it we know that in that industry the true engineer 

 IS dishked. I consider that in the scholastic industry there has been far too much 



years, a mathematician (Osborne Reynolds or Dr. Hopkinson) who has common- 

 sense notions about engineering things, or a fairly good engineer (Rankine or James 

 ihomson) who has a common-sense command of mathematics, we have men who 

 receive the greatest admiration from the engineering profession, and yet it seems 

 to me that quite half of all the students leaving our technical colleges ought to be 

 able to exercise these combined powers if mathematics were sensibly taught 

 in school and college. We certainly have had enough of good matheraaticLins 

 meddling with engineering theory and of engineers with no mathematics wasting 

 their time in trying to add to our knowledge. 



