TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 751 



cerning them, and this thought is perhaps uppermost : are u-e not vi some cases 

 attempting at^ too early a stage the teaching of subjects instead of principles f 

 Complete subjects, I mean, including the practical working of details which will 

 become the regular study of the student in the office or works of an engineer. It 

 certainly seems to me to be so. I do not say that subject training of this kind 

 at college may not be useful ; but we have to consider whether it does not, for the 

 sake of some little anticipation of his office work, divert the attention of the student 

 from the better mastery of those principles which it is so essential for him to grasp 

 at the earliest possible time, and which do not limit his choice in the battle of life 

 to any branch whatever of the profession or business of an engineer, but which, 

 on the contrary, qualify him better to pursue with success whatever branches his 

 inclination or his opportunities or his means may suggest. Not one in a hundred 

 of us can hope to emulate the careers of exceptional men in our profession, but it 

 is sometimes useful to observe those careers, and whenever we do so we find the 

 ■very reverse of specialisation. The minds of such men are impregnated with the 

 fundamental principles which we may call the common law of our art ; it has 

 happened that their practice has been large in certain branches, and small or 

 wanting in certain others ; but in any it would have been equally successful. Of 

 no class of men can it be said with greater truth than of engineers that their 

 standard should be sound knowledge of the principles of many things and of the 

 practice of a few. 



There is some danger in the usual limitation of compulsory subjects in examina- 

 tions for certificates and degrees. When an examination has to be passed subjects 

 not made compulsory are too often entirely neglected, however important to the 

 engineer they maybe. A little learning is certainly not a dangerous thing if 

 within its limits it is sound, and every engineer will in after life be grateful to 

 those who in his student days insisted upon his acquiring some knowledge of the 

 principles of such subjects as electricity and chemistry. At present it too often 

 happens that, unless an engineering student is predestined to practise electrical 

 work or some chemical industry, he begins life as an engineer with little or no 

 knowledge of the principles of either the one or the other, and chiefly as a result 

 of their neglect for the sake of certain subjects made compulsory for the test he has 

 had to pass, which subjects too often include highly speciahsed details which, I 

 venture to think, cannot be rightly mastered in schools. It is natural and right 

 that each professor of a principal subject should seek to make the best, from his 

 own particular standpoint, of every student who attends his lectures or his labora- 

 tories ; and the professor of a compulsory subject cannot be expected to encourage 

 the inclusion, in a course already overcrowded, of secondary or collateral subjec'ts 

 which are dealt with by other professors; while, on the other hand, the pro- 

 fessors of secondary subjects, such as electricity or chemistry, not unnaturally 

 value chiefly the students who make those subjects their principal work. 



For these reasons it appears to me that a certain very moderate standard in all 

 such subjects should be made compulsory if a certificate of proficiency, whether by 

 degree or otherwise, is to be given to students of engineering. 



In the teaching of mathematics within the Victorian age a considerable change 

 lias taken place, and I plead for still a little more change in the same direction wheTe 

 the training of the engineer is concerned. Mathematics, as taught in our public 

 schools— let us say for the Cambridge University Tripos— may be all that is 

 claimed for it as a mode of mental culture ; but of kindred mental culture the 

 engineer must necessarily have more than most men, and much might therefor© 

 be omitted which, to hun at least, has only an abstract value, to the great advan- 

 tage of his mastery over those branches which at once train his mind and give 

 point and direct utility to his solutions. 



In America I understand that a college course of engineering generally includes 

 ■workshop practice designed to supersede the old system of apprenticeship to a 

 mechanical engineer. This fact and other important diflerences between the 

 English and American practice have only lately come to my knowledge, and before 

 they did so the substance of this address had been written. It might, in some 

 particulars, require modification as applied to Canada, but it remains the result of 



