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tation, or none at all, of the physical things about him, and he is consequently constantly led into error by the very facts which ought to be his guides. The scientific training of the student in engineering, on the other hand, will give to the engineer a basis for the most acute and accurate powers for the interpretation of his experience which he can by any means acquire. It will give him a strong and healthy mental digestion with which to build up a professional individuality from the whole body of his practical experience, including the dryest and most obstinate portions. Further than this, an extension of the same principle induces a receptivity of impressions from influences a little beyond the immediate physical facts of his practice and in the region of economic and general interests affected by them, so that he becomes fitted to fill a broader professional field. The higher extensions of engineering practice of the present day reach interests. so thoroughly and even profoundly scientific in some of their features, and so broad and general in others, that no narrow and merely technical education will meet the requirements of the case, and it becomes rapidly less fitted to do so from year to year. The professional engineer is no longer a man with even marked aptitude for construction only. It has come within his sphere not only to employ and to adapt the principles of engineering design, construction, and operation, but also to so present and enforce his conclusions in relation to their effects on economic interests as to carry conviction to the minds of those who direct the latter, and this implies the cultivation of every power calcu

lated to enlarge and strengthen the relations between an individual and those about him. His abstract operations touch at many points living affairs of the community, and it is one of his highest duties to so govern those operations that the interaction of all related interests may be quickened and made more efficient. The capacity of extending these general relations and of placing himself in close touch with the interests to which they lead is by far the greatest power which the engineer can exert in the legitimate extension of his clientage, and it has the added advantage of being absolutely free from that abhorrent method of loud newspaper advertisement of the quack variety by which a man may truly keep his name everlastingly before the public, but which, after all, gains him but notoriety and not reputation. In any aspect of the subject, therefore, whether in the abstract or in relation to pecuniary compensation, it must be admitted that the education in engineering which both trains a man to be a power among men and equips him with the highest quality of strictly professional preparation is the only education which meets or can meet the requirements of the best engineering practice of the present or of the future.

It is possible that the general principles which have been stated are more forcibly illustrated by the progress of mechanical engineering in the field of the application of steam to industrial purposes, and in electrical engineering, than by such results as civil engineering has thus far afforded. The Pennsylvania railroad, however, is as marked an illustration of the adaptability of

engineering principles and practice to a broad engineering enterprise as can be found at the present time. It is not an exaggeration to state that its management has been in the main shaped and directed under influences exerted by the highest grade of engineering education. Further than that, its operating efficiency and economy of maintenance has for many years been maintained at a remarkably high standard by the constant application of what may be called the abstract scientific principles of the natural philosophy of engineering to every detail of those branches of its management, and the wisdom of the procedure is expressed in the dividends. The earliest metallic bridge structures in this country really worthy of the name were the small cast iron or cast and wrought iron spans designed by Squire Whipple. Although the material was in many respects of indifferent character and ill adapted to his purposes, and although many details were exceedingly faulty, the fundamental designs of the structure were scientifically correct, and the efficient service which they continued for many years to render under very much heavier loads than those which they were originally intended to carry shows that they were admirable pieces of engineering work; and they were admirable in spite of the very indifferent material which the iron market then afforded, in consequence only of the sound abstract scientific principles on which their designs were based. Whipple had a perfectly clear conception of the respective functions of chord and web members, which enabled him to design them for the precise duties they were to perform, without the

crude and unscientific experimentation with models which preceded the construction of the great tubular structures, and which left their designers (in their apparent ignorance of the relation between chord and web functions) in doubt as to the carrying capacity of their productions, or whether the latter would need adventitious reinforcement, until they were actually completed and tested. From Whipple's time to the present, every material feature in the vast advance of bridge design in this country has been prompted by continually closer scientific study of the principles of that branch of engineering; and such tests of full-sized bridge members as have been made, have simply and only confirmed what theory has already indicated; in no instance have they contradicted the results of abstract scientific study. They have been of inestimable value in supplementing theoretical work by the establishing of quantitative deductions, without which many theoretical conclusions would fail to possess a determinate character. This position is not even weakened by the fact that the ideal conditions of the purely scientific treatment of these engineering questions are transformed into others in the actual case infinitely more complex. Nothing furnishes so clear a realization of the complex circumstances of the actual case as its abstract scientific study, and there is absolutely no way whatever to an intelligent adaptation of experimental results to the complexity of practical conditions, except through the aid of abstract scientific study of the pure theory involved. It requires no extraordinary acquaintance with engineering literature to discover the most

convincing evidence of the truth of this proposition. The perennial discovery of new long-column formulæ, the erroneous interpretation of the results of the transverse tests of solid beams, the claims for a hydraulic motor of efficiency greater than unity in the comparatively near past, together with other similar theoretical monstrosities, are not too old to be ignored or forgotten. The general observation to which these instances give force is equally applicable to every field of engineering activity. The application of steam to industrial purposes, more especially in the steam engine, received its most powerful impulse through the scientific work (both analytical and experimental) of Rankine, Clausius, Joule, Hinn, and others; and the conditions of development of steam power in later years have been in strict accordance with the lines marked out by abstract scientific study. There is, however, no department of the natural philosophy of engineering in which the higher branches of physical study have been so essential to the advance of practical engineering work as in that of electricity and magnetism. Indeed, it may be said that there could be no electrical engineering without the most advanced mathematical and physical study in electrostatics and electro-dynamics. It is within the personal knowledge of the writer that, during the past year, two among the largest in this country of what may be called electrical engineering companies have applied to at least one engineering school for a number of electrical engineers equipped with a mathematical and physical training materially beyond that afforded by any four-years' course of study

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