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Section G.— MECHANICAL SCIENCE. 

 President of the Section — John Fowler, C.E., F.G.S. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 2i. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



Op all tlie important sections of the British Association the one over which I 

 have now the honour of presiding is, you will all, 1 think, admit, at once the 

 most practical and the most characteristic of the age. In future times the pre- 

 sent age will be remembered chiefly for the vast strides which have been made 

 in the advancement of Mechanical' Science. Other days have produced as great 

 mathematicians, chemists, physicists, warriors, and poets, but no other age has made 

 such demands upon the professors of mechanical science, or has given birth to so 

 many men of eminence in that department of knowledge. Though a member of 

 the profession myself, I may venture before my present audience to claim that the 

 civil engineer is essentially a product and a type of the latest development of the 

 present century. Telford has admirably deBned the profession of a civil engineer 

 as ' being the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and 

 convenience of man, as the means of production and of traific in states both for 

 external and internal trade, as applied in the construction of roads, bridges, aque- 

 ducts, canals, river navigation and docks, for internal intercourse and exchange, 

 and in the construction of ports, liarbours. moles, breakwaters, and lighthouses, 

 and in the art of navigation by artificial power for the purposes of commerce, and in 

 the construction and adaptation of machinery, and in the drainage of cities and 

 towns.' This definition, written more than half a century ago, is wide enough to 

 include all branches of engineering of the present day, although amongst those 

 specifically mentioned the departments presided over by the railway engineer, tlie 

 locomotive superintendent, and the electrician will be looked for in vain. As 

 Telford was beyond all que.stionthe most widely experienced and far-seeing engineer 

 of his time, this little omission well illustrates and justifies my statement that the 

 typical civil engineer of the day is a late product of the present century ; for even 

 Telford never foresaw the vast changes which railways, steam, and electricit}- would 

 evolve in the course of a few years. 



My predecessors in this chaii- have on several occasions stated their conviction 

 that it was better for the author of an address to confine his attention to the par- 

 ticular department of engineering in which he had special knowledge, than to wander 

 over the whole field of meclianical science. A. well-informed man has been defined 

 to be a man who knows a little about even/thiny and all about somethim/. If you 

 give me credit for being a well-informed engineer, I will endeavour to justify your 

 good opinion by showing, whilst presiding at these meetings, that I know a little 

 about steam-navigation, and maclunerj' generally ; a little about iron and steel, and 

 other manufactures, and I trust a good deal about the construction of railways, 

 canals, docks, harbours, and other works of that class. 



There have undoubtedly been published during the last fifty years manj' works 

 of mark and merit, but the work which above all others would, I think, have astonished 

 and perplexed our ancestors, is the little one known to all the civilised world as 

 ' Bradshaw.' This indispensable handbook of the nineteenth centurv testifies that 

 the face of the country is dotted over literally with thousands of railway stations ; that 

 between many of these .stations trains run at two-minute intervals, whilst the dis- 

 tance between others is traversed at a mean speed of nearly 60 miles an hour. 

 The public are often justly indignant at the want of punctuality on some railways, 

 but they should blame the management and not the engineers, for the daily conduct 

 of the heavy traffic between England and Scotland shows, that notwithstanding 



