October 26, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



515 



other distinct and prominent faculty. The 

 great investigators in chemistry, in physics, 

 in biology and in the marvelous combina- 

 tions and ramifications of those and other 

 affiliated sciences were the pioneers in the 

 service rendered by science to the creation 

 of the industries of the world which have 

 been such potent agents in the extraordi- 

 nary advancement of civilization during 

 the past one hundred and fifty years. 

 Every addition to scientific knowledge, 

 meaning simply a closer contact with the 

 realities of our natural environment, has 

 supplied a corresponding field of activity 

 for useful effort and in just that much 

 has enlarged the meaning and the volume 

 of life. 



All these practical or useful extensions 

 of technical knowledge have in fact been 

 made possible by the technical work of the 

 university, although many of the greatest 

 investigators and of those who have been 

 most successful in enlarging useful produc- 

 tion have received their individual stim- 

 ulus and prosecuted their life work out- 

 side of the university organization. The 

 university has been the nursery of useful 

 scientific investigation and the influence of 

 its instruction has extended v/ith an ever- 

 increasing acceleration far beyond the 

 limits of its immediate environment. The 

 practise of every technical profession is 

 founded upon precisely that quality and 

 kind of knowledge established by investiga- 

 tion and by instruction at those centers of 

 learning which only have been the origi- 

 nators and transmitters of useful knowl- 

 edge from the earliest beginnings of science 

 to the present day. Although there has 

 been much scientific investigation and re- 

 markable applications of science to human 

 activities by individuals or in communities, 

 to whom apparently even the meaning of 

 university work was unknown, the funda- 

 mental principles on which the value of 

 the subsequent technical work is wholly 



based will be found in practically or abso- 

 lutely all cases to have germinated in the 

 fertile soil of the university. 



The initial stages of technical education 

 took form first in the universities of 

 Europe. The subsequent development of 

 that educational work into complete tech- 

 nical faculties is found to have been prac- 

 tically concurrent in the universities of 

 both Europe and America, although the 

 former have precedence in time over the 

 latter by comparatively short periods. 

 These faculties have not always been 

 known by the names of the professional 

 practise for which it is the purpose to pre- 

 pare their students, but the apparent de- 

 fect in the continuity of the case is not 

 real. In the earliest university courses of 

 technical study instruction was given in a 

 substantial number of technical subjects 

 under a faculty of broader jurisdiction 

 than that confined to a technical profession, 

 and in some of them that method is pur- 

 sued even at the present time. Such courses 

 of study effectually answered their pur- 

 pose in the early days of the engineering 

 and allied professions, but their adminis- 

 tration has generally been advanced by a 

 natural development concurrent with the 

 growth of the professions which they have 

 served, to remarkable groups of technical 

 faculties of such prominence and intel- 

 lectual strength and with such numbers of 

 students as almost to dominate the true 

 university in some cases, and even to form 

 essentially technical universities in others. 



These great technical faculties have been 

 the direct results of the dissemination of 

 knowledge by the university. Even the 

 professor who has boasted that he never 

 wittingly either learned or taught any- 

 thing useful has been the servant of real 

 learning by extending the limits of scien- 

 tific knowledge which refuses to be hin- 

 dered or circumscribed by its narrowest 

 and most erratic votaries. Wherever there 



