G.— ENGINEERING 167 



is perhaps allowable. I maintain that it is both an easy and an unsatis- 

 factory solution that they propound, whose recipe in effect is either a 

 lengthening or an intensification of our academic courses. The lengthen- 

 ing may be overt — the addition of another year to the honours course— 

 or it may be concealed in a demand for a higher standard at entry, which 

 would mean if adopted a more severe specialisation at school. The 

 alternative, which I have termed intensification, is to load still further our 

 already heavily loaded time-tables : whatever knowledge will or raay be 

 useful to the practising engineer, that knowledge must be acquired and 

 therefore (for this is the essence of the argument) it must be represented by 

 courses in our lecture lists. 



It will be said that I am entitled to call this policy unsatisfactory, not 

 to call it easy. But I am impenitent ; for what I mean by easy is this 

 facile assumption that a subject once on the lecture list will be taught and 

 therefore learned. I am aware that at the age of twenty or thereabouts 

 a student's power of memorisation can be almost uncanny ; moreover it 

 can be (and I am afraid often is) stimulated by intensive ' coaching '. But 

 what concerns us now is his ability to absorb, and this I believe to be a 

 quantity much more obstinately constant. Excepting the really first- 

 class man (who is not the essence of our problem) I maintain that planning 

 must be conditioned, first and foremost, by ineluctable limits to the 

 instruction we can give with confidence that it will really be assimilated. It 

 is easy, I repeat, to proceed on the assumption that lectures delivered are 

 lectures absorbed ; but the fallacy of that assumption will be shown 

 by our third-class students in their examination scripts, by our better 

 students when they come to attempt research. 



As it seems to me, the real and difficult duty of a professor is to decide, 

 not what subjects of instruction should be included because of value, but 

 what can be omitted on the ground that, pushed into a mind already taxed, 

 it will push out something still more valuable. Choice is hard, for there 

 is so much that he would wish to include, so much that has undoubted 

 value ; yet the choice must be made. It will be made harder for him by 

 his colleagues, though from motives of the highest. Abraham Lincoln 

 used to tell of the farmer who said, as to wanting more land, ' I ain't 

 greedy ; I only wants what jines mine.' So every lecturer worth his salt 

 will want, as he approaches the allotted boundary of his subject, to move 

 that boundary just a little back, into fields he sees that are rich and fruitful. 

 It is as though a raft were being equipped for passage on a course as yet 

 unknown, and every lecturer were proffering stores of some different kind. 

 All are of excellent quality, and every kind may be needed in some circum- 

 stance which can occur. Yet attempting to take all, the raft will surely 

 founder : that is the dominating consideration, and we forget it at our 

 peril. 



Neither in a lengthening nor in an intensification of engineering courses, 

 as I believe, shall we find more than a temporary and makeshift solution 

 of our problem ; and this for a reason that is fundamental. However 

 long we make our terms, however full our time-tables, and however great 

 be the capacity of our students to absorb, still we shall have failed to 

 satisfy the demand of industrialists for men of personality, educated to 

 take wide views. I hold it a profound mistake to believe (or to plan as 



