264 
THE TEACHING OF MECHANICS BY EXPERIMENT. 
with the greatest facility and the greatest ease. When we consider that officers 
in the artillery have these excellent pieces of mechanism entrusted to their charge 
to keep in order, to superintend the practical working of and to instruct their 
subordinates how to manipulate them, I think that we owe a debt of gratitude to 
any one who will come here and show us the process, as Professor Ewing has 
shown us this evening, how to carry out experiments with these pieces of mechan¬ 
ism without soaring, as he expressed it, into the higher regions of mathematics. 
It is a fact that most of us have attained a certain standard of mathematics in 
our time and it is also a fact I am afraid that most of us have forgotten a great 
deal that we had learned on that subject, and therefore when an officer finds one 
of these pieces of mechanism entrusted to his charge and he has forgotten all 
about mathematics or a large portion of the mathematics that he used to know, 
he is apt to put it at once on one side and to say, I will have nothing to do with 
this; I do not understand it; it is a complicated piece of machinery and I cannot 
be bothered with it. 
I think; that mechanism is now a subject that ought to be studied by officers of 
the artillery to a larger extent than it is at present. 
Professor S. Dunkerley, M.Sc.: I should like to express, as a teacher of 
mechanics, my entire agreement with nearly everything that Professor Ewing has 
said; but perhaps before making a few remarks there is one piece of information 
which I hope Professor Ewing will give us. He has apparently been making 
experiments on bicycle tyres. Now I am sure we are all most interested in bicycle 
tyres, I know that I am because I am thinking of buying a new bicycle and I 
should like to know which is the best form of tyre to buy (laughter). 
As Professor Ewing has pointed out there are two methods of teaching the 
subject of applied mechanics; one is by means of a piece of chalk and a black¬ 
board and the other is to supplement the lecture by means of laboratory work, 
Professor Ewing’s lecture is particularly interesting to me at the present time 
because at the Naval College at Greenwich the subject of applied mechanics is 
taught entirely by means of chalk and a blackboard. The only advantage so far 
as I can see, that such a system possesses is that it saves the teaching staff an 
enormous amount of trouble, of that of course there can be no doubt. At 
the same time the fact remains that when one is appointed to an inde¬ 
pendent position, one’s desire is to possess a laboratory which will excel any 
other laboratory in the Kingdom, and if the opportunity ever arises at Greenwich 
I know I shall have my work cut out to excel the laboratory that Professor Ewing 
has got together at Cambridge. But the disadvantage and great danger in 
attempting to teach applied mechanics without the aid of a laboratory is, as 
Professor Ewing has pointed out, that the whole subject becomes unreal. I can¬ 
not conceive any worse training (I am not now referring to officers but to boys) 
than to go from school to a college in which the subject of engineering is taught 
entirely by lecture. At the end of a three year’s course the subject must have of 
necessity become very unreal. If the boy or the man has been through the shops 
before he goes to college the subject must necessarily be more real than in the 
previous case. But in all cases whether a man has been through the shops before 
he goes to college or has come straight from school, I think there can be little 
doubt as regards the advisability of mechanical laboratories; always remembering 
that a mechanical laboratory is, in no sense, a workshop—a distinction very fre¬ 
quently overlooked. 
At Cambridge where I was fortunate enough to be Professor Ewing’s assistant 
for a short space of time, Professor Ewing possesses greater opportunities than, 
I think, any other Professor of Engineering and, what is more to the point, he is 
making greater use of those opportunities than perhaps any other single individual 
