NOVEMBEE 14, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



775 



their presence, answering the questions of 

 such students as are earnest enough to 

 come and worry them. In such cases it is 

 absolutely necessary to periodically upset 

 their clockwork arrangements. After such 

 an artificial earthquake one might be re- 

 minded of what occurred at the pool of 

 Bethesda, whose waters had their healing 

 property restored when the angel came 

 down and troubled them. But for a per- 

 manently good arrangement there ought to 

 be very much higher wages all around in 

 the teaching profession. 



No kind of engineering has developed 

 so rapidly as the electrical. Why, it was 

 at the meeting here in Belfast twenty- 

 eight years ago (I remember, for I was 

 a secretary of Section A that year, and 

 took the machine to pieces afterwards in 

 Lord Kelvin's laboratory) that there was 

 exhibited for the first time in these islands 

 a small Gramme machine. This handmaid 

 of all kinds of engineering is now so im- 

 portant that every young engineer may be 

 called uneducated who has not had a train- 

 ing in that kind of mechanical engineering 

 which is called electrical engineering. Pro- 

 fessor Ayrton's laboratory at Pinsbury is 

 the model copied by every other electrical 

 engineering laboratory in the world. He 

 and I had the same notions; we had both 

 been students of Lord Kelvin; we had 

 worked together in Japan since 1875; but 

 whereas I was trying to make my system 

 of teaching mechanical engineering re- 

 place an existing system, or want of sys- 

 tem, there was no existing system for his 

 to replace. Thus it will be found that in 

 every electrical engineering laboratory the 

 elementary principles are made part of a 

 pupil's mental machinery by many quanti- 

 tative experiments, and nobody suggests 

 that it is mere elementary physics which is 

 being taught— a suggestion often enough 

 made about the work in my mechanical 

 laboratory. When students know these 



elementary principles well, they can apply 

 their mathematics to the subject. As they 

 advance in knowledge they are allowed to 

 find out by their own experiments how 

 their simple theories must be made more 

 complex in real machines. Their study 

 may be very complete, but, however much 

 mathematics and graphical calculation may 

 come in, their designs of electrical machin- 

 ery are really based upon the knowledge 

 acquired by them in the electrical and 

 mechanical laboratories. 



The electrical engineer has an enormous 

 advantage over other engineers ; everything 

 lends itself to exact calculation, and a 

 completed machine or any of its parts may 

 be submitted to the most searching elec- 

 trical and magnetic tests, since these tests, 

 unlike those applied by other engineers, do 

 not destroy the body tested. But for this 

 very reason, as a finished product, the elec- 

 trical engineer cannot have that training 

 in the exercise of his judgment in actual 

 practical work after he leaves a college 

 that some other engineers must have. In 

 timneling, earthwork, and building, in 

 making railways and canals, the engineer 

 is supremely dependent on the natural con- 

 ditions provided for him, and these condi- 

 tions are never twice the same. There are 

 no simple laws known to us about the way 

 in which sea and river currents will act 

 upon sand and gravel, and engineers who 

 have had to do with such problems are 

 continually appealing to nature, continually 

 making observations and bringing to bear 

 upon their work all the knowledge and 

 habits of thought that all their past ex- 

 perience has given them. I do not know 

 that there is any job which a good teacher 

 would have greater pleasure in underta- 

 king than the aiTangement of a laboratory 

 in which students might study for them- 

 selves such pi'oblems as come before rail- 

 way, canal, river, harbor and coast-protec- 

 tion engineers; there is no such laboratory 



