PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 617 
Education and Training of Engineers. 
Interplay of action and reaction make for progress not only in the evolution of 
the scientific industries, but also in the development of the individual engineer. 
In him, if his training is on right lines, pure theory becomes an aid to sound 
practice ; and practical applications are continually calling him to resort to those 
abstractions of thought, the underlying principles, which when known and 
formulated are called theories. Recent years have brought about a so much 
better understanding of education, in its bearing upon the professions and 
constructive industries, that we now seldom hear the practical man denouncing 
theory, or the theorist pooh-poohing practice. It is recognised that each is 
useful, and that the best uses of both are in conjunction, not in isolation. As a 
result of this better understanding distinct progress is being made in the training 
of engineers. Of this the growth of the engineering departments of the univer- 
sities, and of the technical colleges and schools, affords striking evidence. The 
technical schools, moreover, are recognising that their students must have a sound 
preliminary education, and are adyancing in the requirements they expect of 
candidates for admission. They are also finding out how their work may best 
supplement the practical training in the shops, and are improving their curricula 
aceordingly. In the engineering industry, too, Great Britain is slowly following 
the lead taken in America, Germany, and Switzerland, in the recognition afforded 
to the value of a systematic college training for the young engineer, though there 
is still much apathy and even distrust shown in certain quarters. Yet there is 
no doubt that the stress of competition, particularly of competition against the 
industry and the enterprise of the trained men of other nations, is gradually 
forcing to the front the sentiment in favour of a rational and scientific training 
for the manufacturer and for the engineer. As William Watson, in his ‘Ode on 
the Coronation,’ wrote in a yet wider sense of England :— 
For now the day is unto them that know, 
And not henceforth she stumbles on the prize ; 
And yonder march the nations full of eyes. 
Already is doom a-spinning.... 
Truly the day is ‘unto them that know.’ Knowledge, perfected by study and 
training, must be infused into the experience gained by practice: else we com- 
pete at very unequal odds with the systematically trained workers of other 
nations, Nor must we make the mistake here in the organisation of our 
technical institutions of divorcing the theory from its useful applications. In no 
department is this more vital than in the teaching of mathematics to engineering 
students. For while no sane person would deny that the study of mathematics, 
for the sole sake of mathematics, even though it leads to nothing but abstract 
mathematics, is a high and ennobling pursuit, yet that is not the object of 
mathematical studies in an engineering school. The young engineer must learn 
mathematics not as an end in itself, but as a tool that is to be useful to him. And 
if it is afterwards to be of use to him, he must learn it by using it. Hence 
the teacher of mathematics in an engineering school ought himself to be 
an engineer. However clever he be as a mathematical person, his teach- 
ing is unreal if he is not incessantly showing his learners how to apply it 
to the problems that arise in practice; and this he is incapable of doing if 
these problems do not lie within his own range of experience and knowledge. 
Were he a heaven-born senior wrangler, he is the wrong man to teach mathe- 
matics if he either despises or is ignorant of the ways in which mathematics enter 
into engineering. The fact is that for the great majority of engineering students, 
the mental training they most need is that which will enable them to think in 
physics, in mechanics, in geometric space, not in abstract symbols. The abstract 
symbols, and the processes of dealing with their relations and combinations, are 
truly necessary to them: but they are wanted not for themselves, but to form 
