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precisely the services for which their training should fit them. Again, the duties of the consulting engineer are rapidly extending so as to include the exercise of the most potent influences in the control of enterprises depending, not only upon his scientific knowledge as an engineer, but also on his capacity to convey to his clients correct impressions of the relative values of all the elements which effect their interests, and on which their final action will be based. The complete and satisfactory discharge of such functions cannot, from their very nature, be accomplished on a bare possession of technical knowledge. This is indeed essential, but it is just as essential, and perhaps more so, to know how to use it. The character of many of the questions which come before the engineer for consideration almost compel profound and solitary thought, and thus much of his purely professional activity removes him from all cultivating influences of a forensic or rhetorical nature through which men are most moved. There are, then, few professinal men to whom the broadly cultivating influences of a liberal education are more needful than to the engineer. His early professional practice does not induce any development which can fill the voids of a faulty general education, while his later practice demands what only the liberal training can supply.

For this reason I am very strongly inclined to believe that those engineering schools of the future which are to supply the highest grade of professional instruction will, for the most part, be found connected with our greater universities. Doubtless those of

our isolated technical schools which have already attained eminent positions as centers of instruction in engineering will develop to even greater eminence, but the circumstances of the past are materially and rather rapidly changing, and the new conditions require more and more the university environment. The systems of instruction in all grades and kinds of the higher educational work attain to greater efficiency and respond far more readily to the requirements of a wider growth when that work is in close, living contact with all that nurtures it. The perfect professional education is not by its nature a product of isolation, but it is the composite and final result of every true educational influence to which the individual has been subjected. Every such influence is rendered intrinsically more effective, and the receptivity of the individual is largely increased in the university atmosphere. Although originally starting with a somewhat different attitude toward this part of the subject, the writer has for many years been convinced by an extended and active experience, considerably more than half of which has been in the most practical kind of practical work, that the views here expressed cannot be successfully contested. These views have recently found further confirmation in the fact that in Great Britain, where advanced education in engineering science for engineers has, until a comparatively late period, been rather generally regarded as of secondary importance, the university of Oxford has made complete within the past four or five years the list of all the principal universities of the United Kingdom affording courses of study

in engineering. It is singular that there should have been any doubt or indifference in regard to the university training for an engineer in a country where one of the earliest systematic courses of civil engineering study was founded in a university, and made famous by the name of Rankine. Nevertheless, that which the professional training of the engineer by its nature requires has spontaneously assumed the form of a demand to which the university best responds, and it is as true for this and every other country as for Great Britain. It may, of course, be said that many of the greatest engineers of the past have attained their eminence in many cases without the aid of any advanced education whatever, and that what has not aided in the attainment of such marked success cannot be imperatively necessary to any degree of success. Now it may be said at once that it is not any part of the purpose of an engineer's training to ascertain how little he may know and yet succeed; nor again, are the exceptional powers of genius, or the still more exceptional aids of favoring conditions of life, available for service in the equipment of the great majority of engineers who are to form the profession of the future. The real answer, however, to such an observation is short and simple. There has been, strictly speaking, no profession of engineering until within the last thirtyfive years. The eminent men who are so frequently named as the engineers of the past were truly great constructors, but they cannot be placed in the same class as the professional engineers of the present day. Their chief characteristics were a certain kind of

genius for construction, and boldness. The writer yields to no one in honoring their memories, but it cannot be denied that they never could be sure of their results except when they had wasted enough material in one structure to make a duplicate under modern design. Any modern engineer who should undertake to follow their precedents would soon find himself without a clientage. Those precedents make admirable monuments, but the engineer of the present must not direct his practical operations by them, but by economic conditions which are based upon exact scientific treatment of all the elements that can influence the end which he wishes to accomplish; and this brings us to what will here be named as:

The second fundamental characteristic of the ideal education in engineering, a thorough training in what may be termed the natural philosophy of engineering, which embraces all that body of mathematical and scientific knowledge constituting the pure theory of engineering operations. This lies directly at the foundation of the professional engineer's practice. Indeed, this feature of an engineer's educational training is as profoundly practical as it is profoundly theoretical; it involves the rules of practice by which an engineer is to reduce his inevitable errors to a minimum; he cannot avoid them all except by doing nothing. Now, whatever duty an engineer may be called upon to perform in a professional way, whether to design an engine or an electric plant, or to build a bridge, a system of water works, or a railroad, he is inevitably compelled to pursue either the one or the other of two courses. He may blindly

follow precedents, and do something simply because somebody has done something else more or less like it, adopting the handbook method of construction and thus get a result which may for a time satisfy his clients and enable him to secure his compensation, but which he is utterly unable to defend from criticism and which sooner or later the better equipped engineer must usually be required to remodel or reconstruct, either in whole or in part. Or, on the other hand, he may approach his work with an intelligent appreciation of the principles or laws which govern the physical sequence of the things that he is to control and adapt to the use and convenience of that part of mankind served by his clients or directly by himself. In one case he imitates and in the other he creates. In the former he is defenseless against his own ignorance, while in the latter he is equipped for perfect safety, even though he may occasionly err. I do not underrate the value of experience in completing the education of the engineer; experience is an imperative necessity for every human being, and the engineer forms no exception to the law. In fact, his complete education consists of two parts. The first is that systematic and logical training in so much of the mathematical and physical sciences as is included directly in engineering operations or as may be indirectly required by them, and which collectively constitutes the natural philosophy of engineering, which training is secured only in the professional school; while the second results from the experience of the first few years of the young engineer's practical life, and it consists in

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