June 4, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



the profession, by increasing the work of 

 the college course. These are probably 

 necessary changes ; and yet I want to sound 

 one note of warning: 



There is danger, I believe— and I am not 

 alone in this belief —that you may shut out 

 of your engineering courses boys who have 

 natural abilities which fit them for success 

 as engineers and yet are deficient in some 

 branch of study, perhaps mathematics or 

 the languages. 



I do not underestimate the value to an 

 engineer of either of these branches ; yet I 

 feel that they have been often overesti- 

 mated in the framing of our engineering 

 courses. 



There is danger, if you place your em- 

 phasis too much on purely scholastic at- 

 tainments in your engineering schools, that 

 you may raise up a generation of scholastic 

 engineers,- expert in theory but weak in its 

 practical application. The mathematical 

 side of the profession and even the research 

 laboratory have been, if anything, overdone 

 already. We must lay broader founda- 

 tions than these typify if your graduate is 

 to successfully compete with his rival, edu- 

 cated in the school of hard knocks. A 

 broader training than this is needed if your 

 engineer graduates are to meet the demands 

 of this twentieth century. 



Do you say, what are these demands? 

 I want to impress upon you that the coun- 

 try to-day needs engineers of high type as 

 it never has needed them before. Few 

 realize the enormous change that has taken 

 place in the relations between the engineer 

 and the public. Go back less than a cen- 

 tury—no longer ago than the lifetime of 

 men still living — and you find the engineer 

 almost unknown. Civilization and indus- 

 try knew his prototype — the millwright, the 

 builder, the miner; but their art was the 

 art handed down by tradition, crusted over 

 with superstition and error. The applica- 



tion of science and the scientific method to 

 industry had barely begun. 



Go back half a century and we have the 

 beginnings of engineering : the railway, the 

 steamship, the development of the mine 

 and the waterfall. There were great men 

 among the engineers of those pioneer days. 

 We do well to honor their achievements. 

 Yet the problems of that day, seen in our 

 present light, were simple. The engineer 

 was a necessity in very few industries. 

 His art was not yet so complicated that it 

 could not be mastered by the diligent stu- 

 dent with little aid in the way of text-book 

 or teacher. 



But the period since the civil war, and 

 particularly the latter half of that period, 

 have seen social, economic and industrial 

 revolutions, such as the world has never 

 before witnessed. Civilization finds itself 

 face to face with a multitude of perplexing 

 problems. And a very large number of 

 these problems are so interwoven with our 

 industrial development that the engineer 

 is needed to aid in their solution. 



I have told you that engineers are needed' 

 to effectually solve the problem, "What is 

 worth while." Is it worth while to spend 

 two himdred million dollars to build one 

 kind of lock canal at Panama, or three hun- 

 dred million dollars to build the one we are 

 now completing, or five or six hundred 

 millions to build a sea-level canal? Is it 

 worth while for the government to spend 

 half a billion dollars on waterway improve- 

 ments? Is it worth while for a state to 

 spend a million or ten millions on good 

 roads? How much ought a city to spend 

 on sewage disposal, on the purification of 

 its water supply, on lighting its streets? 



I know engineers who shirk these ques- 

 tions, who say that the engineer should 

 take a humble back seat while the states- 

 man, the lawyer, and— if you please— the 

 ward alderman decide these questions. 



I tell you, gentlemen, this is a huge mis- 



