APRIL 19, 1901.] 
to which reference was made in these notes in 
ScIENCE for March 1, has appeared in Part I., 
Vol. XLIII., of the Annals of the Harvard 
College Observatory (pp. 33, pls. IV.). 
R. DEC. WARD. 
SCIENCE AND INDUSTRIAL COMPETITION. 
Two small but very significant publications, 
recently issued from the press, will interest 
every intelligent citizen, and should particu- 
larly interest the man of science, the practi- 
tioner in applied science and, perhaps most of 
all, the always rare but always influential states- 
man.* The one isa reprint of letters to the 
London Times, the ‘ Thunderer,’ from an able 
and distinguished Briti:. engineer traveling in 
the United States and reporting to that paper 
upon the aspects of ‘American Engineering 
Competition ’; the other is a series of addresses 
and magazine articles by Professor John Perry, 
the able and original electrician and engineer, 
upon methods of teaching the sciences. Thereis 
possibly an important connection between the 
two seemingly diverse subjects. 
The one describes the latest and best, as well 
as the most important, of American methods 
and apparatus of industrial production. The 
universal adoption of scientific methods ; the 
extensive employment of the product of inven- 
tive genius; the utilization of applied science 
in any and every possible way in the promotion 
of the arts ; the adoption of scientific methods 
of organization, of administration and of main- 
tenance of the great systems of industry, of pro- 
duction, transportation and distribution ; the 
universal faith in and practice of systematic and 
scientific processes of ore-production and trans- 
portation, of trans-shipment, of reduction ; the 
manufacture of iron and steel, ‘manufacturing’ 
all articles made of iron or steel rather than 
simply ‘making’ in older way ; the part taken 
by automatic machines in the rapid transforma- 
tion of the older into the newer system, with 
**¢ American Engineering Competition,’ being a 
series of articles resulting. from the investigations 
made by the Times, London ; N. Y. and Lond. Har- 
per & Brothers, MDCCCCI. 8vo., p.139. $1.00. ‘Eng- 
land’s Neglect of Science,’ by Professor John Perry, 
M. E., etc., London. T. Fisher Unwin, 1900. 8vo., 
p. 113. $1.00. 
SCIENCE. 
631 
resulting increase of product per man, and of 
wages, and yet with decreasing costs and prices : 
all these elements of industrial progress are 
discussed. The other sharply arraigns the 
English educator for his utter neglect of the 
applied sciences and for his indifference to their 
utilization in the life and work of the English 
people, and attributes the later relative retro- 
grade movement of Great Britain in part, at 
least, to this neglect of science and to the 
greater activity and the statesmanlike policies 
and methods of education of Germany and the 
United States. 
The one traces in a most admirably complete, 
yet condensed and succinct, way the great 
movements n the fundamental industries of the 
United States during the past decades and up 
to its recent astounding development of a for- 
eign trade. It closes a most intensely interest- 
ing and instructive and suggestive discussion 
by two chapters on the labor question, which 
this author seems to think a much more im- 
portant element in the relative decadence of 
Great Britain as a manufacturing nation than 
even that neglect of science which has awakened 
Professor Perry’s most serious apprehensions. 
In the other book, that distinguished electrician 
criticises, not the science-teacher so much, nor 
even the leaders in the industrial systems of 
his country, but the members of his own pro- 
fession who, as he thinks, are themselves indif- 
ferent to the progress of science and to its 
utilization for the benefit of their country and 
profession. He criticises the methods usual in 
teaching mathematics, that ultimate basis of all 
engineering, and discusses in his characteris- 
tically original and forceful manner the defect 
of technical education in England and the de- 
fects of such asisattempted. Outside the work 
of the Science and Art Department at Kensing- 
ton, he finds apparently little to approve. For 
that department he has cordial words of praise. 
His discussion may be taken as an important 
supplement to John Scott Russell’s famous 
work.* 
After reading these two little volumes one 
can hardly fail, however, to come to the con- 
clusion that, while it is true that the American 
producer just now bursting into the field of 
* ‘Systematic Technical Education,’ London, 1869. 
