THE TEACHING OF MECHANICS BY EXPERIMENT. 263 
average student, and especially for the student who intends to put his 
mechanics to some practical account, there is beyond any question a 
very real advantage in experiment. What I have been saying may 
have reminded you of a celebrated teacher who proceeded as he him¬ 
self said upon the practical method. In “ Nicholas Nickleby ” we are 
told how Mr. Squeers taught the boys how to spell “ winder ” and 
then made them go and clean it; how to spell “ bottiney ” and then 
weed the garden. There is a great deal to be said for this ; but, in 
Mr. Squeers 5 hands, the laboratory method had two serious draw¬ 
backs. One was that the book-work, the work of the lecture room, 
was badly done ; the other was that there was no sufficient connection 
between the book-work aud the laboratory work, for there is no 
essential connection between the spelling of window and the cleaning 
of it. But I submit there is a connection between the mathematical 
exposition of a mechanical principle, and the experiment by which 
that mechanical principle is directly illustrated. Of course the system 
is liable to abuse, and the student may, perhaps, make the mistake of 
supposing that the quantitive experiment is what really proves to him 
the proposition. It does not do that, and if that is the basis on which 
he is learning his mechanics, he is learning it quite unsoundly. The 
quantitive experiment is only intended to enforce the proposition, to 
make it real to his imagination and his intelligence. There is a danger, 
possibly, of the laboratory method getting a little overdone in some 
branches of teaching, and if this should ever happen what one would 
then have to insist upon would be the paramount necessity of system¬ 
atic training from the mathematical point of view. At present how¬ 
ever, I think that in the teaching of mechanics we may safely empha¬ 
sise the advantages of experiment. 
DISCUSSION. 
The Chairman : I am sure you would be glad to hear any remarks that any¬ 
body will be so kind as to make. I will call upon Major Yon Donop. 
Major S. B. Yon Donop, It. A., Professor of Artillery, Royal Military Academy, 
Woolwich :—I think all of us present here this evening may congratulate our¬ 
selves on having listened to a most instructive and interesting lecture, and I think 
that this lecture, when it is published, as it will be, no doubt, in the “Institution 
Proceedings”, will be of the same benefit and instruction to those Officers who 
have not been able to be here this evening, as the “ Proceedings ” are sent to all 
quarters of the World. 
This subject of mechanism has of late years become a very important branch of 
the Science of Artillery. We have only to walk into one of our coast forts, or 
those of us who live at W oolwich to walk dowu to the Arsenal to see what 1 may 
call the triumphs of engineering skill that are now made and issued to us to look 
after and to work with. Anyone might have seen a few months ago down at the 
Arsenal a modern mounting for one of the latest type breech-loading guns; and 
going up to that mounting one was able, (although mounting and gun weighed 
something like fifty tons), with one arm and using as I might say only the wrist 
power of that one arm, to traverse the whole of this mounting and gun round 
