lyo SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



to regiment them too strictly in the five years we are apportioning ; we 

 must not forget the importance of leisure to the formation of personality. 

 And here I fancy that you no less than ourselves will find your details apt 

 to negative your principles : you too in my experience are inclined to fill 

 the whole of every available day. But to show that we mean business we 

 teachers now, as a first step, ask you to scrutinise our syllabuses and say 

 from your experience whether items could be omitted either (i) as never 

 likely to be applied in practice, or (2) as being easily and more appropriately 

 learned in works. We do not engage to drop a subject because you have not 

 found it useful : that may be an accident of your particular interests, and 

 even though no industrialist finds it useful (speaking professionally) we 

 must still reserve a right to teach what we believe to have educational 

 value. But every item on your list we will undertake to scrutinise care- 

 fully^ — to put, so to speak, on trial ; and I for my part do not doubt 

 that thereby we shall find much that has crept into our courses more by 

 accident than design.' 



I leave the problem there, for in detail my views should be expressed 

 in the council that I advocate, where they can be countered, rather than 

 here as it were ex cathedra. Stated broadly, my thesis is our need of 

 ' lightening ship ', and here I would only emphasise that I am not advo- 

 cating the exclusion from lectures of all matters excluded from a syllabus. 

 As engineering advances, inevitably as it seems to me things that were 

 essential tend to become rather of academic or historical interest. Con- 

 crete examples are dangerous ; but I feel that forms of link motion, with 

 which every engineer had to be familiar in days when the reciprocating 

 steam engine had no serious rival, should be discussed now (in a non- 

 specialised course) rather as examples in the theory of velocity and 

 acceleration images, and ought no longer to have a place of their own in 

 the syllabus. 



II. 



9. I turn to research. Other teachers will feel as I do that life would 

 be a duller thing if teaching were all, if we ceased to have that zest for the 

 unsolved problem, and the rarer thrill of a problem solved, that every 

 researcher knows, though his problem be of interest to himself alone. 

 What answer then can we make to the pessimistic forecast, that engineering 

 research at universities is doomed to ultimate extinction, because as 

 engineering comes to make ever fuller use of mathematics, physics and 

 chemistry, more and more its problems will be such as only specialists 

 in those subjects can investigate, while for ad hoc experimentation generous 

 provision exists, and will increase, in government institutions and in the 

 research departments of our larger works .'' Here too, as I see it, is a 

 challenge we must face together, whether we be users or purveyors of 

 research. Demand will react on supply, and supply on demand : unless 

 in collaboration we shall not plan aright. 



For my own part I am persuaded that here, where the case for pes- 

 simism seems at first most strong, it is most easily answered. I do not 

 believe that departments of engineering will either cease from research 

 activity or be merged in departments of physics or chemistry, for the 



