this a great scheme, but if the money here proposed to be expended by states could be concentrated in the establishment of one or two high grade Engineering Universities, what a grand scheme it would be. But if this money or a part thereof can be secured in this way, and in no better way, it should not be hindered, it will be money put into education.

PROFESSOR E. A. FUERTES desired to speak first on this question for he knew there were many speakers desiring to attack the Bill, and he did not wish to have them steal his thunder. He was strongly opposed to this Bill because its provisions are such that they will thwart the very purposes which the Bill claims to favor. It has already been stated here that there are more than one hundred engineering colleges in the country, and this is probably four times as many colleges as are needed, since a few schools, strong, well developed and equipped, and especially well manned and located, are abundantly sufficient for the needs of the entire country. We have now more than a hundred colleges, many of them hectic little affairs, under the control, in a large number of cases, of boards of trustees or direction, or of legislative committees, who are unable to understand the meaning of what the profession needs in the way of investigation. Under the propositions of this Bill neither the students nor the colleges will be able to investigate honestly. The investigating side of a college must be entirely separate from the training and drilling side needed by the students. There are, to-day, very few colleges in the country whose professors are competent to investigate, and the intention is to speak most re

spectfully, and of course excepting the number of professors in our colleges who are very eminent men. These, however, are necessarily very few. To investigate, that is to discover new laws or improve old practices, it is necessary that the investigator should be first, thoroughly acquainted with the field; then, that he should discover what is wanted; that he should command the necessary material equipment; and lastly, that he should know how to get at the results expected.

This Bill proposes to create at least forty-four little schools that it does not guarantee will be properly manned or located; that it does not furnish with enough capital, and therefore such schools will, inevitably, strengthen the greatest of all evils from which the engineering profession is suffering in this country, and in fact, not only the engineering profession, but very largely many educational interests: namely, the spirit of pretense based upon the thinnest smattering. What we really need is a few very highly endowed, superior colleges, to lead on others to better work as preparatory schools, and improve the entire gamut of engineering prestige and practice. Why not concentrate the potentiality of this large appropriation at Washington or Chicago, New York and California, to produce the effects required, instead of wasting money upon irresponsible little spots here and there over the United States?

The teaching of engineering, to-day, requires a large and expensive equipment and an expensive method of using it. Such an equipment as the engineering school demands, if used for teaching, should be em

ployed only to give fundamental instruction in the principles underlying the relations of force to matter, keeping the action of the laboratory hand in hand and parallel with the work done in the lecture and class room, to develop and build up the proper habits of study in the student. The object of such a laboratory in a school is purely to shorten the time of instruction by the adaptation of the short cuts that this method. commands over the old methods of descriptions and unprovable statements; and besides placing the student squarely before nature, teach him to study it and acquire the habit of honest observation from which to obtain concrete ideas.

This Bill also contemplates government superintendence or control, a most undemocratic and also inefficient speculation. With a few bright exceptions, apparently growing fewer every day, much of the scientific work of the government is perfunctory, and nowhere more routine-ridden than in that bureau where this Bill places the little State Colleges. Everyone who has followed the work of this kind of government bureaus has seen how even some of the strongest ones have petered out into nothing. There is our National Observatory; since the time of Commodore Sands, when "The Line" took charge of it, it has remained as silent as an oyster. It has now there a few great men, but they cannot produce anything, whilst a few of them have abandoned the sinking ship and are at Johns Hopkins or elsewhere. Whatever little of science is left in many of these bureaus is honeycombed by vanity and efforts at notoriety. There is the Weather Bureau, which has been unable to keep an independent head for a long

time, yet some of its officers are in every newspaper puffing up the work of "The Service," while the thermometers register only the temperature of hot iron roofs and the belching exhaust pipes and chimneys of elevators and restaurants which surround the station in New York and in other large cities. In so far as meteorology is concerned, they might as well carry the thermometer in their vest pockets.

Can anyone fail to see that these forty-four colleges, with forty-four testing machines, forty-four chemical, forty-four physical, forty-four geological, forty-four engineering laboratories, and forty-four times everything else, can but fritter away and waste money, salaries, resources and opportunities? To develop constructive engineering and its progress, the experiments of these little schools will be worthless. Not long ago the whole engineering world was startled by a fiasco in New Jersey, which assumed calamitous dimensions. What was the reason for it? Aside from details not necessary for this purpose, the main fact is that we have not experiments on a scale large enough to be applicable to the questions involved, and without which the country is exposed to incalculable losses. Will fifteen, twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars a year be sufficient to settle this and many other questions, in rivers, harbors, canals, railroads, bridges, etc., demanding proper scientific care? The education of young men should not be and is not at all involved in the reasons for the existence of a large experiment station.

This Bill speaks of the Charlottenburg school, near Berlin, as a pattern, or example, that we should fol

low. At Charlottenburg, Zurich, and the Ècole des Ponts et Chaussées, what this Bill calls schools are only official government laboratories, to which students have rarely access, excepting as onlooking visitors; and the tests performed are either on account of the public works of those countries or official investigations by the professors, and not as part of their educational systems with undergraduates. At Zurich there is no work requiring a pound of rail, iron or steel, that goes into a bridge, or a cubic foot of masonry that is put up, but what is looked into, analyzed and tested, at the national bureau in which the government has a great deal of pride. It is not under the direction of the adventitious professor, good, bad or indifferent, connected with that or some other school, but its personnel has been chosen with the utmost honesty, and all employees are eminent in their profession. The results of the researches of such an institution as that would be worthy of confidence by all engineers. Will the researches of our little projected schools be recognized as progress made or be accepted? Not unless the investigator is known; for such work is not always self-proving. Is there an engineer who will use, in his practice, the statements of people about whom nothing is known, unless it be that there are probabilities of their being incompetent to do the work, by reason of the poverty of their facilities and equipment? If this govern

ment should do as the German, French, Swiss or Italian governments have done, and establish a large, fully equipped station near the shores of each ocean, giving to them the entire sum of the money called for by this Bill, this money would be one of the best in