G.— ENGINEERING 165 



science have so extended that no man now can hope to comprehend the 

 whole of physics, or chemistry, or any other field : specialisation has 

 become imperative. But engineering science embraces all these fields ; 

 its boundaries extend not only continuously, as knowledge grows in 

 tracts already surveyed, but at times by a sudden accretion of new terri- 

 tory — as when recently the new technology of plastics came to replace, 

 for many purposes, older methods of fabrication in wood or metal. Thus 

 a problem strictly speaking insoluble confronts, and will always confront, 

 all schemes of training for industry : What should be the content of a 

 university training .'' What is to be our policy in the face of this con- 

 tinuous accretion of knowledge, seeing that there is no corresponding 

 increase in the capacity of undergraduates to absorb ? 



4. I mean to offer later some tentative answers to these questions, but 

 now I am concerned with something more important. The time I say 

 is past when they could be discussed as it were in vacuo, without regard 

 to developments outside ; and the same is true of the other main activity 

 of engineering schools, which is original research. Policy must be dictated 

 by circumstances, and in research our circumstances have changed most 

 drastically since the war : first, by the trend of modern physics, which 

 has profoundly altered the relations of pure and applied science ; secondly, 

 by a quite unprecedented growth of industrial and governmental institu- 

 tions concerned with scientific experiment. We see this change of 

 environment if we study the records in past reports of grants made 

 by our Association to special committees charged with the study of 

 particular problems. From 1832, when it called for a report on the 

 state of knowledge in Hydraulics (a report which ended on the wistful 

 note : * It only remains for us to notice the scanty contributions of our 

 own countrymen. While France and Germany were rapidly advancing 

 upon the traces of Italy, England remained an inactive spectator of their 

 progress '), through the 'sixties, when it made its invaluable contribution 

 to electrical engineering by providing accurate standards, and up to quite 

 recent times, the Association has done much through the agency of these 

 special committees. But the fact that now its funds are less widely 

 devoted to such aims need not, I think, be matter for regret. Provision 

 exists elsewhere, and its contributions now are of different kind. 



Supposing that like the fat boy I were minded to ' make your flesh 

 creep ', could I not find argument here for pessimism in regard to the 

 future of engineering schools ? As to research, I have always held that 

 in universities it must find justification not in what is consequential — 

 the utility of its results — but in what is intrinsic : the urge of the scientist 

 to discover, like the urge of an artist to create, is something that will not be 

 denied. But will the engineering laboratory continue to be essential, 

 if more and more the trend of engineering practice is towards applica- 

 tions of fundamental chemistry and physics, and especially if provision 

 for ad hoc experimentation continues to extend as it has in the past twenty- 

 five years ? Can we gainsay that our science is not, like chemistry and 

 physics, a separate branch of natural philosophy, but natural philosophy 

 studied from a particular standpoint and with a special purpose .'' Well 

 then, does it not follow logically that we, as non-specialists, must look to be 

 ousted ultimately as specialisation becomes more intense ? Will there 



