882 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII. No. 701 



enter zoology as a profession, with the 

 well gi unded hope of attaining such a 

 position a.j his talents deserve. 



H. V. Neal 

 Knox College, 

 Galesbueg, III. 



THE CHEMICAL EDUCATION OF THE 

 ENGINEER ' 



The academic education of the civil 

 engineer is a thing of yesterday ; or rather, 

 it is a thing of to-day. Yesterday it was 

 not. I use the word, "civil" in its origi- 

 nal sense. Balbus was, without doubt, a 

 military engineer. The great roads of an- 

 tiquity were built by soldiers. In the 

 Motherland, yours and mine, there were no 

 roads till the Roman legions made them. 

 On this continent, the canoe and the blazed 

 trail were suiScient till Braddock's three 

 hundred axemen hewed their way through 

 the forest from the sea to Fort Duquesne, 

 and our Governor Simcoe connected Lake 

 Ontario with the lake that bears his name 

 by the military road which, in imitation of 

 the old Roman Watling Street, he called, aa 

 we call it still— Yonge Street. 



But steam changed all this. With steam 

 came railways ; and with railways came the 

 civil and the mechanical engineer, and to 

 them has been added, in our own day, the 

 electrical engineer. At first, the civil and 

 the mechanical engineer learned their 

 trade, like everybody else in those days, by 

 apprenticeship. They learned to play the 

 fiddle by playing the fiddle, without any 

 lectures on the physical and the physio- 

 logical bases of harmony or any exercises 

 " zur Fingerf ertigkeit. " And grand 

 musicians they were, those old masters who 

 wrote their opera on staves of iron ruled 

 across two continents ; whose treble was the 

 shriek of the locomotive, and whose bass 

 was the roar of the blast furnace, whose 



' Read at the Chicago meeting of the American 

 Chemical Society. 



choruses were sung by the toilers of the 

 nations, and whose libretto was the record 

 of the world 's progress. 



It is a truism that genius often gains its 

 end by bursting barriera and breaking 

 rules. But for all that, we have come to 

 think that education will not hinder the 

 genius, and will surely help the engineer. 



It is noteworthy that France, where one 

 word stands for both genius and engineer- 

 ing, led the way in this matter. Engineer- 

 ing education dates from the foundation 

 of the Ecole des Fonts et Chausees. Ger- 

 many followed ; then America, like one 

 born out of due time, but now become the 

 greatest of the Apostles. Nay, at last, 

 even my countrjrmen, clothed as they are 

 with a contempt for theory which throws 

 off the undulations of the intellectual ether 

 more completely than polished nickel, 

 backed by a conservatism more imperme- 

 able than infusorial earth, even English- 

 men are giving signs of viscosity; and 

 British public opinion is flowing forward 

 with a motion like that of a glacier, slow, 

 indeed, but sure and irresistible. 



"We agree then that the engineer shall 

 be educated. But shall chemistry form 

 one of the subjects of his education? As- 

 suredly yes. For what is an engineer? 

 He is a man who devises and supervises the 

 construction and use of engines— contriv- 

 ances— that is, for yoking the forces of 

 nature to the service of man ; and what are 

 chemistry and physics but the ordered and 

 methodical study of these forces and of 

 their action on the materials of which 

 machines are constructed and upon which 

 they work. 



I am speaking to-day as a chemist to 

 chemists, and it is safe to say that we are 

 all pretty well agreed as to the kind of 

 teaching that is best for the professional 

 chemist, whether his career is to be tech- 

 nical or academic. 



