Let us consider these points in order:

First. INFORMATION v. TRAINING. American engineering educators will probably agree that the main function of our engineering schools is to give training. A school cannot make an engineer, and few claim to do So. In order to be an engineer, a man requires four things: Judgment, experience, knowledge and training. Judgment, no school can give, though it can train the judgment to accurate and careful habits. Experience the school cannot give, but it can train the student to assimilate and make use of the experience of others. Knowledge, it can give to a certain extent, but best of all, it can give to one qualified to receive it, a training which will enable him to think clearly and to acquire knowledge rapidly. With a naturally sound judgment, and with the training which a good school gives, such a young man should possess a foundation sufficient to sustain the most lofty structure of knowledge and experience which can be built upon it, and ought to be able, in a very short time, to become an engineer and a good engineer.

Among the most unfavorable tendencies that are to be noted occasionally in engineering schools is the tendency to substitute information for training. With the degree of training which our students at the present time bring to the technical schools, such a tendency, if carried out to any very considerable extent, will, in the writer's opinion, always prove fatal, resulting in ruleof-thumb methods, and a smattering of engineering practice which is only a cloak for ignorance of principles.

One of the greatest advances in the theory of education, however, has come from the gradual realization of the fact that opportunities for training are found, not alone in the old scholastic studies of the classics, philosophy, and mathematics, but that they are as numerous as the possible subjects of study. The good teacher of any subject whatever, will be able to make it an opportunity for training of some kind. The various sciences and their manifold applications, no matter how closely allied to commercial pursuits, may, as we all know, be made the means of training even better than systems of philosophy or the theory of functions. Less than a year ago a very distinguished professor in one of our colleges publicly expressed his profound regret that one of his colleagues had devoted himself to the commercial applications of his chosen science, instead of to pure science alone, thus (he said) greatly lowering his ideals. Such views are relics of the dark ages of education, and are happily becoming less and less common.

Probably all of our engineering educators recognize the importance of training. In different schools, however, or in different parts of the same school, the amount of training given varies considerably. Some schools devote considerable time to descriptions of details of construction and of operation, as such, merely as matters of information, while the lecture system, pure and unadulterated, is still used to a considerable extent where, it seems to the writer, it ought not to be. We still frequently see in our schools immature young men, unable to think or reason accurately for themselves,

capable of being misled by sophistries at every point, and conducted to any conclusion which the lecturer might desire. We still see such men listening to a discourse from some eminent lecturer, involving fine points of logic and intricate processes of reasoning, and supposed to be assimilating it all. The writer's views regarding the lecture system are perhaps radical, but they are the result of many years' use of that as well as the other systems of instruction. He looks upon the simple lectures as almost useless as a means of training, and as simply a means of presenting facts and arguments. A trained mind may listen to a lecture on an intricate subject and profit thereby, while an untrained mind would gain little or nothing. Lectures should be used only for purposes of demonstration in experimental subjects, or for purely descriptive subjects which are not claimed to be training subjects, and which we, in our schools, have time to introduce only to a very limited extent. Sometimes, however, circumstances may, for a time, prevent the use of any other method; as, for instance, when no satisfactory text-book is available and there has not been opportunity to prepare one; but in most cases the lecture system, pure and simple, should be modified by preparing to some extent cyclostyle or other notes, by allowing the students time to take notes, or to copy what is put upon the blackboard, and to ask questions, and by occasionally quizzing them during the lecture, or sending them to the blackboard.

It is doubtless true that occasional lectures, if well considered and well presented, often serve a good

purpose in imparting interest to work that might otherwise be dry, and in inspiring enthusiasm in the listeners. A good student will sometimes leave the class-room after listening to an eloquent lecture, filled with enthusiasm for investigation and research, and will bend all his energies to the work before him. But the poor student, or the man who needs help and not mere suggestion, who cannot work by himself and does not know how to think, he will get little benefit if he tries to master any mathematical or theoretical subject by listening to lectures.

In the writer's undergraduate days, both here and abroad, he listened to many courses of lectures, but he does not remember in any single case to have made use of the voluminous notes he took; nor does he believe that any large proportion of the students who listen to lectures in our technical schools ever make use of their notes afterward, or in fact take notes in such form that they can make use of them with reliance upon their accuracy.

The great distinction between continental and American schools in this respect is, that in the former lecturing is the common mode of instruction, combined, of course, with drawing and field exercises in some subjects. In some mathematical subjects there are hours devoted to solving examples, and almost all the instruction is still in the form of lectures. During the the three years the writer spent in a German polytechnic school no instruction was given except in this way and in the drawing room. There was no recitation work whatever. The teacher never asked the student

a question or tried to find out whether he was thinking correctly. During these lectures the students are supposed to take copious notes, which they generally do in ink, and these notes are frequently not written up afterward. The question arises, how much of one of these lectures could a man really take in at the time, while writing with all his might and main to take down what the lecturer said or put upon the blackboard? Some of the professors publish their lectures, either in book form or as lithographed sheets, but this fact does not affect their lectures at all; they go over in the lecture precisely what is given in the book, the latter not being used in any sense as a text-book. In fact, in some cases the purchase of these notes is not obligatory; they are simply provided for those who wish them, and many indigent students do not procure them, but depend entirely upon their own notes. Many students went entirely through the polytechnikum at the university without purchasing a single text-book, but came out with voluminous notes on the calculus, and on all the engineering courses. Even courses in complex mathematical subjects like the theory of elasticity and hydrodynamics, with equations as long as your arm, were given by lectures and the equations all written out on the blackboard in the course of the lecture, the students eagerly copying.

In connection with the lecture system, one other disadvantage which it possesses may here be noticed, namely, the lack of personal contact between the student and the instructor. It is a common characteristic of our schools that the students come into close