August 1, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



147 



sees the application and need of good letters 

 and figures, and even after he has had the 

 theory of any good system of lettering care- 

 fully expounded, he will never make good char- 

 acters till he has toilsomely applied that theory 

 many, many times. Again we may awaken the 

 interest of the student in, say, the art of plan- 

 ing wood with a hand plane by showing first 

 the principles of power planing machines and 

 then the construction and principles of hand 

 planes. But he will never master the use of 

 the instrument except through persistent and 

 often toilsome effort, even though that effort 

 be made interesting by application to practical 

 problems. And the general principle is true of 

 all fundamental work, mental or manual, that 

 the student expects to build upon for the future. 

 There is a tremendous difference between 

 knowing a lot about general physical phe- 

 nomena with the methods of finding the prin- 

 ciples involved, and the power to use the 

 formal statements of these principles in at- 

 tacking other problems. And while, as before 

 stated, it may sometimes be desirable and suffi- 

 cient to stop at the end of the first or second 

 stage noted above, care must be exercised that 

 this is not done in any subject where the accu- 

 rate and confident use of the formal principles 

 rediscovered are essential to future progress. 

 Evidently this applies to the teaching of all 

 elementary fundamental subjects, but the di- 

 viding line may perhaps be made more clear 

 by studying the problems presented in so-called 

 industrial education, which is very likely to be 

 effected by this new movement. 



Aside from inherent ability and general or 

 liberal knowledge the accomplishments that 

 industrial workers must possess are of three 

 kinds: (1) Manual skill; (2) industrial or 

 manufacturing knowledge; (3) scientific 

 knowledge and the ability to use it. The first 

 is self-explanatory. The second refers to the 

 knowledge of shop processes and methods of 

 manufacturing and the finance and economics 

 of production. The first two may be partially 

 acquired in schools, but as a general principle 

 their full attainment must be acquired in the 

 atmosphere of the shop or factory. The third 

 refers to the knowledge of the natural scien- 



tific laws that may, in general, be acquired 

 from books better than from actual shop work. 

 Now the position which an industrial worker 

 may occupy is governed by the relative amount 

 of these three accomplishments that he may 

 possess. Thus a good tool-maker must possess 

 a certain amount of scientific knowledge and 

 must possess a maximum of manual skill. 

 The shop manager must possess a certain 

 amount of scientific background but must be 

 highly informed regarding manufacturing 

 methods. The engineer must have some man- 

 ual skill and shop knowledge and must be well 

 grounded in scientific principles and their ap- 

 plication. It is important to note that he 

 must not only have a general knowledge of the 

 scientific phenomena on which his work is 

 based, but he must be able to apply their for- 

 mal mathematical expressions freely and ac- 

 curately. Superficial knowledge is not enough. 

 In his most highly developed form the engi- 

 neer must pass out of the realm of visualized 

 principles and reason with abstruse, abstract 

 scientific phenomena far removed at times 

 from the practical. The ability to do this re- 

 quires not only a full knowledge of principles 

 but an ability to use them that can come only 

 from long and persistent practise. And it is 

 to be especially noted that the foundation of 

 this ability must be laid in the school. Time 

 was when a bright man could easily acquire 

 in the shop the scientific background required 

 for any engineering work. The complexity of 

 modern engineering has, however, changed all 

 this and the man who is to rise to any height 

 in the field must in general acquire this scien- 

 tific background before he enters it. Men 

 seldom add to their scientific hase line after 

 leaving scJiool, and the height to which they 

 rise along scientific lines is measured almost 

 absolutely by the amount of solid scientific 

 training they take away from the school. This 

 is not dogma, but history, and can be easily 

 verified by any one. It is particularly true of 

 the electrical engineer and similar industrial 

 workers in the higher levels of industry. 



But all the courses offered to the embryo 

 electrical engineer need not be of the search- 

 ing character indicated by the above. Thus 



