And yet it was a tardy awakening. Although Myddleton, a century and a half before, had brought the New River water into London, Drake had given an aqueduct to Plymouth in 1594, and Vermuyden from Holland had executed great levees, embankments and drainage works, Smiles says:* «*** we depended for our engineering, even more than for our pictures and our music, upon foreigners. At a time when Holland had completed its magnificent system of water communications, and when France, Germany and even Russia had opened up important lines of inland communication, England had not cut a single canal, while our roads were about the worst in Europe."

But, while the profession was rising in England to dignity and honor, there was no organized system of technical education. It was the period of self-taught

Only in rare cases did early advantages include the university. These men came slowly to professional maturity; were developed from the conditions and needs of the times; both made the profession and were made by it. Apprenticeship in the engineer's office was both the school and the road to advancement. Methods were empirical; knowledge of principles imperfect; economic conditions and necessities too much. ignored; and the great works, many of them monumental, are not examples for modern imitation. Nevertheless the system has borne magnificent fruit in the vast and enduring-but usually too costlyworks, which have been the chief means of establishing and confirming British domination in every quarter of the globe.

* Lives of the Engineers. Vol. 1, Introduction.

What may be termed the first regular school of engineering in England began as late as 1840, in University College, London. The same year saw the chair of civil engineering founded by Queen Victoria in the University of Glasgow, where Rankine did so much for engineering education. The well-known Thomason Engineering College at Roorkee, India, was founded in 1847, and in 1892 there were four engineering colleges in that country. Five years ago official statistics named 41 engineering schools in the entire British empire, nearly half in the colonies; but the greater part of these were properly schools for artisans. In 1876 Capt. Douglas Galton testified that, even then, the successive stages for a civil engineer were: A liberal education at some school or college; regular or apprenticed pupil to a leading engineer; assistant to an engineer; and, finally, independent practice. Only three years ago a noted English engineer, before the world's greatest engineering society,* deplored the continued past neglect of abstract science and theoretical training by the great body of English engineers.

Turning to France we find early recognition of the value of organization in the conduct of public works. The Corps des Ponts et Chaussées was established by law in 1716. The importance of systematic technical instruction was so clearly perceived by Perronet that he is said to have made a beginning for the École des Ponts et Chaussées in 1747, and labored for it until its official recognition by an order of Turgot in 1775. (The magnificent stone bridges and other public works * Address of Prof. Anderson, Engineering, LV., 682.

of this distinguished engineer doubtless served as models for the next generation in England.-Bridge of Neuilly, 1768-1773.)

The year 1765 saw the beginning of the famous Mining Academy at Freiberg; 1794 of the École Polytechnique at Paris, by act of the National Assembly; 1815 the Polytechnic of Vienna, and 1821 of the Royal Polytechnic Institute of Berlin. These and later schools on the Continent have largely made the profession there, and have exerted a constant dominating influence upon it. The prestige of governmental control and generous support, the high rank of leading professors, not only as teachers, but as investigators, practicians and authors, have, during half a century or more, attracted many American students who, in their turn, have had a large and healthy influence upon the schools and practice in America.

American engineering practically begins with this century, and the United States Military Academy was, from the start, a nursery of civil engineers. Its first graduate in 1802, General Swift, was a distinguished military and civil engineer. During more than half a century, about two hundred of its graduates became civil engineers, some of whom achieved the highest distinction; and this not because civil engineering ever had a very large place in the curriculum, but because the rigid military discipline and thorough instruction in mathematical and physical science, well equipped its graduates for the exigencies of that period. Thence issued, in 1837, the first formal treatise on civil engineering in English. Its honored author, Professor Mahan, gives a list of works then available to the stu

dent, an instructive glimpse of the book resources of that day. His own text book was so well esteemed that in 1872, fifteen thousand copies had been sold; it was reproduced in quarto form in England, was used in one of the Government schools in India, and was translated in whole or in part into several foreign languages.

The name of the Rensselaer Polytechic Institute of Troy is synonymous with engineering education in America. Founded in 1825, nurtured by the wisdom of Amos Eaton, sending out the first graduate civil engineers of the English-speaking world in 1835, just at the opening of the railway era, it has, from its early start, ever maintained the highest standard of effective training in its course for civil engineers. Its graduates have been in the fore-front of the profession for fifty years.

*This list was: Sganzin's Programme of Civil Constructions at the Polytechnic, Paris; Edinburgh Encyclopedia, articles on bridges, canals and carpentry; Tredgold's Carpentry and Tredgold on Cast Iron; Transactions of the Society of Civil Engineers; De Pambour on the Locomotive; Wood on Railroads; Storrow on Conveyance of Water; De Gerstner, Chemins Orniére; Treussart on Mortars; all the works of Navier (then an author since 1817).

We must note that Mr. Storrow's work (1835) was probably the first systematic treatise on hydraulics in English. Its author (still living) graduated from Harvard, studied in the French schools, and not long afterwards built the works of the Essex Company, at Lawrence.

Prof. D. H. Mahan was himself a graduate of the United States Military Academy, a special student in France, for 37 years the head of the department of military and civil engineering at the Academy, and the author of no less than six works on military and civil engineering, all of which were widely used as standard for half a century.

We may note also that Davies, Church and Bartlett, distinguished graduates and professors at the Military Academy, by their admirable treaties on mathematics, physics and astronomy, exerted a wide influence in promoting the best technical education throughout the United States.

These were some of the results of the administration of Col. Sylvanus Thayer, the reorganizer and "father" of the Military Academy, from 1817 to 1833.

The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, through its drawing school and lecture courses, also did a useful work after 1826 in the elementary instruction of engineers as well as of artisans.

As our thought is upon early history, other wellknown schools need no mention here.

But, apart from the schools, as in England, we survey a goodly line of eminent men who owed little or nothing to such aid; men of native ability, whose training was on the works and in the office. However, the results in America were better than in England. Lack of resources forbade costly experiments. The judicious adaptation of small means to the greatest possible outcome established the true principle of engineering practice. Before 1840, American engineers had already achieved a world-wide fame by the novelty and magnitude of their works. The builders of the early canals and railroads soon departed from English precedents, and the famous constructors of timber bridges and promoters of steam navigation set examples for the world, even from the first decade of the century.

In Stuart's "Lives" of twenty well-known American engineers, born between 1731 and 1827, one quarter were school-trained-three at West Point, one at Yale, and the last, Roebling, at the Royal Polytechnic, Berlin.

This summary of antecedent conditions may be concluded by briefly viewing, in the United States,

THE SITUATION BETWEEN 1860 AND 1870. In 1866 there were six engineering schools of established reputation which had graduated during the