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men outside the college who are, in many cases, glad to do what money can toward the prosecution of such investigations. Care should be at all times taken to see that whatever apparatus is procured for special research is so made, if practicable, as to serve the general purposes of the laboratory after its special work has been completed. This, the highest and most fruitful of all work in engineering schools will prove too costly to be undertaken by any colleges but the wealthy few, and only with great caution and conservatism by them; but it is the line in which the engineering schools are to-day most rapidly developing, and in which they are doing most for the profession and for the world. The application of scientific methods to the solution of the great engineering problems looming up before the profession promises to do more for the world than has any other systematic professional work ever yet undertaken. The schools are coming to be well-springs of professional and general knowledge of fact and phenomena such as the world never before saw or dreamed of.. That school which can find the men to use and the apparatus to be used in the acquirement of new facts and data, and in the revelation of new processes of nature and their useful applications for the promotion of the work of the world, will do most for all.

Fortunately it is the first part of this line of work that is most essential; the cost of the first installments of the equipment need not be great, and in time every school in which the ambition and acquirements of its faculty are commensurate with its opportunities

will gradually and steadily increase the outfit, until it will, in time, become prolific of large additions to human knowledge. A small equipment of home-made apparatus in the hands of one master-mind will always prove more productive of real and valuable results than the largest and most ambitious of equipments in the hands of ever so many men of ordinary or mediocre talent.

Five thousand dollars will give a good start for a laboratory of instruction in experimental engineering; hundreds of thousands in good hands may be profitably employed for the good of the profession and of the nation. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars, thanks to the intelligent liberality of the wealthy citizens of our country, are being spent in the direction of the elevation of our technical schools and their work, and with more than commensurate advantage to the country. Upon the thorough education of our engineers depends very largely the future progress of the nation.

DISCUSSION.

PROFESSOR J. B. JOHNSON said he thought this was the most important subject in engineering education, now in process of development. It seemed to him that the highest engineering science in our generation is going to be directed to the study of materials and scientific methods of investigation. The application of mathematics to engineering problems has surpassed the study of engineering materials. This latter is now the most important part of engineering study.

We analyze a problem mechanically, we find the nature of the stresses for instance, then we must put something there to resist those forces, and there the knowledge of the materials is required. It remains for us to discover properties of materials as yet perhaps unknown, and methods of producing materials with properties as yet unrealized, and the methods of determining the qualitative and quantitative failures and sources of partial failure. Scientific investigation in the study of materials is the work which the engineering school is now called upon to do as it has never yet been done. It is in this direction that the schools are leading the profession, and it is in this direction that practicing engineers must come to the schools and do come to the schools for advice and information; and the schools are responding promptly to the demand.

DR. H. T. EDDY thought the remarks of the speaker had been very specially directed toward schools of mechanical and electrical engineering, but he had reached some points that all had not succeeded in arriving at. One of these points he did not attempt to settle, but merely described the difference between those shops which are carried on with a view to make them pay their own way, and those shops which are carried on more purely for educational purposes. The underlying objection perhaps was not so put to the fore as it would be in practice when we attempt to carry on shops without profit, and purely for educational purposes, which shall give the same amount of training that those shops do which are carried on for profit. The former become very costly, and it seems possible

that there may be a sort of medium course between these two horns of the dilemma, that it may be possible to keep the educational object exclusively in view and still do an amount of manufacturing for the market which will very materially relieve the financial situation which results when so large an amount of shop practice is taken as is supposed to be taken in such a course as this. This middle course consists in doing work for the institution itself, and for the building up and enlarging of the school. This is, as Dr. Thurston was fully aware, a field which some shops and laboratories have cultivated, by supplying not only machinery for their own schools, but for other schools, and it is one which can be very usefully and conveniently cultivated; but the commercial question ought never to be brought into a school in such a way as to say that the shop must pay for itself in whatever direction the education may be led by that consideration. He for one deprecated the establishment and carrying on of shops of the kind spoken of where a commercial product is the controlling factor; and the student, when he becomes adept in a particular process, is kept upon that process because it pays. It interferes with his education and he loses time and strength which ought to be used in a different direction. This is a consideration which ought distinctly to turn educators to a shop practice which shall be distinctively for educational purposes. That secondary point may be kept in mind, which will relieve the financial strain somewhat, but he distinctly desired to discountenance manufacturing for profit as a primary consideration.

PROFESSOR D. S. JACOBUS agreed with Professor Eddy that the shops should not be made to give an income to the institution. The main objection found at the Stevens Institute is that if every student in the institution had the same amount of ability and was a fair machinist, then a system could be adopted whereby the work could pay and every student could be put on different classes of work. But suppose they undertake to build an engine for the trade, there are certain classes of work that you could not trust at all to some of the students, they would make a botch of it, and the work would always necessarily be given to those who had shown themselves capable of performing it, and yet when it comes to following up those very same students who cannot work very well in a shop we find in many instances they come out just as well when they get into practical things as those who are adepts in the shop. Therefore they adopt the rule that every one shall know the principle upon which work is done, and every student has the same class of work and every one has the same opportunity for learning, which could never be obtained if they had a system whereby they had to distribute the work to those students who could do it best, or even acceptably.

PROFESSOR H. W. SPANGLER said it had always seemed to him that the professors and the mechanical engineers stood on two entirely different planes.

There are two classes of colleges in this country, in one of which the financial question is a much more serious one than it is in the other. That is, while it is serious enough in all, the land-grant colleges are in a

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