140 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



to engineers but to the general public which can only be solved by 

 supplementing experience by direct and indirect attack, using all the aids 

 that mathematical and experimental science can give. It is also desired 

 to suggest that all the arguments for a public interest in scientific 

 research apply with particular force to the work of this section. 



It has been said and with truth that engineering is much older than 

 modern science. In Mesopotamia and in Egypt, long before the dawn 

 of the Christian era, irrigation and other works of great magnitude were 

 carried out. Two thousand years ago the Romans made roads, con- 

 structed waterworks and erected bridges that fill us with admiration and 

 wonder. The engineer to-day has to guide him the accumulated experi- 

 ence of many thousands of years and for a solution to many problems 

 with which he is faced he has to fall back upon this accumulated 

 experience and to his intuitive ability. For this reason it is sometimes 

 argued that, engineering is an art and that it owes little to science. 

 Recently an important engineering journal wrote, ' The idea that en- 

 gineering is based upon scientific knowledge is both wrongful and harmful, 

 as it is generally understood. We had bridges before there was a theory 

 of continuous girders and steam engines before there was any theory of 

 thermodynamics.' That engineering is an art demanding that creative 

 ability and doing associated with art, as distinct from knowing in the 

 strict scientific sense, is true and it is also true that there were bridges 

 and prime movers before there was any organised theory of structures 

 or thermodynamics, but it does not appear true to say that there was any 

 possibility of such bridges as the Forth Bridge, the Sydney Harbour 

 Bridge, the Zambesi Bridge, and the Hudson River Bridge of 3,500 feet 

 span, now in process of construction, before the birth of modern science 

 and the scientific method. Neither was there a useful steam engine or 

 other great and efiicient prime mover before there came into the intel- 

 lectual life of Europe that wonderful renaissance out of which modern 

 experimental science was born. The Eastern scholars who came to the 

 West after the fall of Constantinople brought amongst their treasures 

 the works of Ptolemaic philosophers, in which were described experiments 

 with heated air and steam, the reciprocating pump, simple water-wheels 

 and many ingenious mechanical devices. For 1500 years Roman and 

 Mediaeval Europe had neglected experiment and from Hero to Galileo 

 little or no progress was made in the development of structures, machines, 

 and prime movers. The revival of the experimental method leading to 

 the wonderful conquests of physics and chemistry and in the new attempts 

 to co-ordinate the results of experience into a body of theory, assisted by 

 the new mathematics, gave to engineering that impetus and assistance 

 necessary for the achievement of the last century. 



' Meanwhile let no man look for much progress in the sciences, especially 

 in the practical part of them — unless natural philosophy be carried on 

 and applied to particular sciences and particular sciences be carried back 

 to natural pliilosophy ' wrote Francis Bacon in 1620 (Aphorism LXXX, 

 Novum Organum). Twenty-four years after Bacon wrote these words 

 Galileo died and in the same year Sir Isaac Newton was born. From 

 their joint labours, carried out without any desire of practical usefulness, 

 came the principles of mechanics without which, it is surely not too much 



