250 THE TEACHING OP MECHANICS BY EXPERIMENT. 
subjects as chemistry and physics simply by the spoken or written 
word, with perhaps the aid of a few lecture-table experiments. Some 
of us, perhaps, were fortunate enough to learn to interrogate nature 
for ourselves in the domestic attic or cellar, with no more elaborate 
apparatus than could be obtained by spending a part of our pocket 
money in some neighbouring chemist’s shop. It would have surprised 
us then to be told that the joys snatched in such a way, casual and 
perhaps surreptitious as they were, did more than all the lessons of 
the schools to form our intelligence in scientific matters, and to give 
us a real hold of the foundations of physics and chemistry. The boy 
who begins the study of these subjects now-a-days is in a very 
different case. Unless he has been specially unfortunate in his school, 
he finds that the doors of a more or less lavishly equipped laboratory 
are open to him. He has no longer to be content with natural know¬ 
ledge told at second-hand ; he is brought face to face with things. 
Going on from school to the University he there finds the laboratory 
method in its highest degree of development. The systematic ex¬ 
position of any branch of science given in the lecture room is followed 
by time spent in the laboratory, where under the direction of 
(< demonstrators ” the student himself carries out experiments designed 
to make the truths learnt in the lecture room vivid and real. His 
knowledge of principles acquires a new meaning, it takes form and 
substance when it relates to matters that his eyes see and his hands 
handle. In students of the best kind laboratory training engenders 
habits of observation and of independent thought, but even in the 
average youth it at least does something to foster exactness and to 
make the dry bones of a science marshal themselves and start into 
life. The old conception of a laboratory reserved it as a place of 
research for the trained specialist; the new conception of a laboratory 
makes it an instrument of education even for the rawest student, 
while it still remains no less a place of research. 
My own work as a teacher deals with engineering and with 
applications of physical and mechanical science to engineering. In 
this subject, as much as in any, the development of the laboratory 
method has wrought a profound change. The introduction of 
engineering laboratories was mainly due to the initiative of a single 
teacher, Professor Kennedy, who established one at University College 
just twenty years ago. Professor Kennedy has now relinquished 
professional work, but his influence as a teacher survives not only in 
the laboratory he himself formed, but in many laboratories which 
have been formed on the same general lines in other engineering 
schools. * 
In the engineering laboratory created by Professor Kennedy, and 
in most of the laboratories that have been modelled upon it, the 
experimental work which the students are set to do was mainly 
directed along two well defined lines. One of these was the testing 
of the strength and elasticity of materials, and the other the testing 
of a steam engine to determine its consumption of steam and of coal in 
relation to the power developed. The chief pieces of apparatus were 
