those exacting the highest skill and the use with ease, accuracy, and certainty, of the most important machines, and the concluding courses should be regular exercises giving the desired manual training, with more or less of instruction in the processes of construction and assemblage of parts and complete products. If the school be one of mechanical engineering of the highest grade, for example, and its students men of some maturity and ambition, pursuing a course of purely professional training, the shops of the school must be prepared to illustrate all the processes of the trades subsidiary to that branch of engineering, to aid instruction in every elementary principle and in all applications of woodworking, blacksmithing and toolmaking, foundry work and machinist's work, that commonly contribute to the development and completion of the engineer's designs. The course to be given will have been properly planned in all details, in advance, and the outfit will be selected in such manner that every tool needed will be supplied, each in the number required to do the total work demanded of the kind for which it is specially contrived, and with the result, when the shops are in operation, of keeping every tool working constantly, and of invariably meeting every demand for the specific operation contemplated by the designer of the course and of its products. In such shops, it is usually considered desirable that the course should begin with so much of manual training, in each of the trades, as will give the novice a fair degree of familiarity with the tools, their purposes, and their

use, as well as of the character of workmanship attainable or desirable-the finest workmanship is not always the best, in business-following this preliminary instruction by the more ambitious work of actual construction of one or more standard articles of manufacture. These articles are so chosen as to illustrate best the largest number of mechanical operations, while, if possible, producing a machine or other product of interest and value in itself, as seen both from the point of view of the instructor and from that of the engineer. The collection of an outfit of tools for such purposes as these evidently involves careful study, large experience, and excellent judgment. Failing these pre-requisites, large sums of money may be utterly wasted; for such equipments are very costly at best. In no direction will be found larger differences between the cost and the results of operation of well-selected and properly employed outfits on the one hand, and badly chosen and inefficiently utilized tools. and machinery on the other.

An outfit for experimental engineering, both for instruction and for research, constitutes, in the larger and more advanced schools, the most important and fruitful of all portions of the equipment. This is a kind of work which, as a matter of course, can be profitably undertaken only after the student has acquired a good knowledge of the higher mathematics, including a strong course in applied mechanics, and after he has obtained a fair knowledge of the subjects which are to be made the objects of investigation. In the great engineering schools, the undergraduates are

given a course of laboratory instruction in this experimental engineering work; while the labors of investigation, and of scientific or professional research, are only undertaken, as a rule, by men of maturity, graduates of the schools well-prepared by education and professional experience as well as by that natural aptitude which is no less essential, for carrying on this highest and most exacting of all scientific work. In the writer's own experience, he has, however, often seen admirable and permanently valuable work performed, with exceedingly fruitful results, by young men who had this talent and who had made themselves familiar with the art and with the state of its science, in departments of knowledge and of engineering work in which research involved no very serious intricacy of mathematical investigation or extensive scientific knowledge; while some of the very best investigations of a higher sort that he has ever known have been the work of young men making a specialty of the subject investigated.

The effect of such a training in this kind of application of the principles already learned in the classroom upon a bright student is, however, remarkable, whatever the nature of the course in which he engages. It awakens an interest in science, and in its useful applications, such as no other method of instruction. can produce. It gives him new powers, new interests, new and substantial knowledge, knowledge acquired at the finger-ends as well as by the exercise of the mental faculties, and thus more real and more perma

nent than any "learning of the schools" purely can ever be.

The process of preparation of the equipment in this department should be similar to that already described in connection with the subject of toolequipment. That is to say, the beginning should be made with the simpler and less costly apparatus required to illustrate the elementary or introductory portion of the course; and this selection of material should be made in such manner as to fit to each section of the course of instruction just that apparatus which will best, and in the simplest and least expensive way, exhibit its principles or its methods. Thus the instruction may be made progressively more and more complete and valuable, without in any manner neglecting the duty of thoroughness of instruction. The quantity of apparatus required will be determined by the length and the character of the work undertaken. In many schools, only a very elementary course can be given, and the apparatus will be small in quantity and inexpensive. In the more advanced schools, large sums can be profitably expended in the procurement of apparatus which will suitably illustrate a course of instruction involving the application of the most advanced courses of instruction in all the physical sciences. These courses in experimental work commonly begin with instruction in the use of instruments capable of employment in the illustration of facts and principles relating to strength of materials and other lines of work demanding the practical employment of principles and methods taught to the sophomore or

junior classes of the school or college, and they are gradually extended as it is found practicable, until they include a fairly complete provision for the illustration of every scientific application of the class-room work, and in all departments of engineering, even including those of thermodynamics and the fundamental work in steam-engineering.

When the undergraduates have been thus taken care of to the limit of the collateral courses of undergraduate instruction, provision may be undertaken for graduate and original work in research. The apparatus here called for is, often, of an entirely different description from that previously previously demanded for the undergraduate department in experimental engineering. While the use of the same apparatus is, to a very large extent, practicable-and wherever practicable, desirable-it will be found that the special apparatus of research is often, if not usually, necessarily constructed especially for the purposes of the investigation contemplated. It is special, and therefore, as a rule comparatively costly. It is generally used only for its one primary purpose, and therefore may have only historical value when finally, the work being completed, it is set aside. Colleges must evidently, for these reasons, go into such work with the greatest caution, and it will often be found impracticable to undertake important and desirable lines of research in consequence of their costly requirements in apparatus and for labor. In such cases special contributions must be depended upon from those among wealthy and patriotic and interested