XXII. S. H. BARRACLOUGH. 



during my term of office of my sincere friend, and one time 

 instructor, Dr. R. H. Thurston, the Director for 18 years 

 of the Sibley College of Engineering at Cornell University. 

 Although probably not generally known to the public of 

 this country, his name was a household word amongst 

 engineers and educators in America and Europe, both as a 

 professional man, and an expert in educational matters. 

 He has not inappropriately been called the father of the 

 modern engineering school. As a young man he passed 

 through the engineering workshops, took an arts degree at 

 the University, entered the Engineering Corps of the U.S. 

 Navy, and served all through the Civil War ; and after- 

 wards occupied a chair in the Naval Academy until in 

 1870 he accepted the then rather novel Professorship of 

 Mechanical Engineering in the Stevens Institute of Tech- 

 nology, where for 15 years he laboured in developing, what 

 was for its time, an unusually efficient course of instruction. 

 Indeed his syllabus of instruction of that early date is in 

 many respects a model even for to-day. 



In 1885 lie was called to be the first director of the Sibley 

 College of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell, and began, 

 what he rightly felt to be, the great work of his life. Start- 

 ing as it did from small beginnings, and a few dozen 

 students, he had the great reward for his labours of seeing 

 the College, with its now more than one thousand students 

 and its splendidly differentiated courses of instruction, 

 develope into what, even at the risk of being considered 

 biassed, I cannot but describe as one of the finest pieces 

 of organisation in engineering education in existence. 



Amidst the multitudinous duties of so great an office, he 

 had that highest of all arts of seeming and being always a 

 friend to the many thousands of students who came under 

 his care. Their wants always claimed his ready attention; 

 their letters years after leaving college were always 



