TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 739 



Section G.— MECHANICAL SCIENCE. 



President of the Section — Professor A. B. W. Kennedy, LL.D., F.R.S., 



M.Inst.C.E. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 9. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



The Critical Side of Mechanical Training. 



While there is no place in the kingdom more suitable for a meeting of the British 

 Association than Oxford, and certainly no place in which it is more delightful iov 

 the members to meet, it is yet to be admitted that there are few places which 

 have much less in common with the special work of Section G. Nominally 

 devoted to ' Mechanical Science,' the Section has for many years specially dealt 

 with those branches of applied mechanical science which constitute the business of 

 the engineer — to quote the well-known words of the Royal Charter, ' the art of 

 directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man.' 

 The association of this ancient and learned city with boilers and chimneys, with 

 the noise and racket of ordinarj' mechanical work, seems an incongruity. Even 

 the harmless necessary railway station is kept as far away as possible, and the 

 very river flows with a quiet dignity which seems to shut out the thought of 

 anything more mechanical than the most ancient and futile of water-wheels. 



Naturally enough these considerations did not tend to make more easy the 

 choice of a subject ibr this address, and I have come very near to agreement with 

 a recent critic in the opinion that presidential addresses are, in fact, almost 

 immoral in the nature of ihhigs and fit only to be abolished. Finally, I decided upon 

 taking up my present subject, as being one in which the academic rather than the 

 technical side of our work comes to the front, while at the same time it does not lead 

 me out of lines in which I have been able, in past years, to work myself. It is now 

 twenty years since I first took any active part in the scientific training of engineers, 

 and five since I ceased to do so. T have often wished that I may have been at all 

 as successful in teaching others at University College as I was, at the same time, in 

 teaching myself. And since I have ceased to teach I seem to have been spending 

 my time in fiodinpr out how much better I could now do it than was possible when 

 I was actually engaged in it. This may be pure imagination on my part ; there 

 is nothing more easy, as we all know, than to suppose that we know best how to 

 do the things that other people do, and not the things we have to do ourselves. 

 Indeed, I understand that tliis is the recoo;nised attitude of the really superior 

 critic. If, however, in anything which I have to say, it should stem that I am 

 finding fault with what is now being done, I may at least point out that most of all 

 I am finding fault with myself for not having done right when I had ihe opportu- 

 nity — an opportunity which can now never recur. Indeed, instead of the decorous 

 and unobtrusive heading which I have given to this address, I might have indicated 

 its general lines almost as truly if I had entitled it ' The Regrets of an Emeritus 



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