358 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
rigid and relentless exclusion of unfit applicants for admission, a thor- 
ough sifting of the undergraduates every year, are for the good of the 
school, the students themselves, and the world. A pupil who proves to 
be lacking in mathematical ability can never become a civil engineer, 
and, as soon as he is found out, it is a merciful thing for all parties to 
burn him aside to something adapted io his powers. That institution is 
entitled to the most credit which makes the best showing of graduates in 
olaces of trust and power, rather than a long catalogue of undergraduates. 
We have tried to view the subject from without as well as from within 
she school, and in summing up can say : 
The graduates of our best technological schools have shown themselves 
;0 be fairly qualified for their work. 
The number of well-furnished institutions is still very limited, and we 
must not consider every one who has a degree of B.S. as necessarily a fair 
representative of all who are really entitled to the degree. 
There is room for improvement in all the schools. One of the indis- 
pensable means of increasing the efficiency of schools of technology is to 
orovide well-equipped laboratories of all kinds. 
The schools should also keep in touch with the industrial world by 
arranging frequent visits and excursions to manufactories, mines, engi- 
neering works, and specimens of architectural skill. 
The courses of study might well be revised, but this work must neces- 
sarily be left to the faculties of the respective institutions. 
The higher schools cannot do their best until the preparatory schools 
are much improved. 
EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF EXACT MEASUREMENT. 
BY PROFESSOR ALFRED M. MAYER, OF STEVENS INSTITUTE OF 
TECHNOLOGY, HOBOKEN, N. J. 
MODERN physical science may be defined and distinguished from the 
tnowledge of the ancients, as knowledge founded on exact measurements. 
{t had its birth about the time Newton was born, toward the middle 
of the seventeenth century. At that period two notable inventions were 
made : one, the vernier, the invention of Pierre Vernier, of France, who 
described it in ¢‘ La construction, Pusage et les proprietés du Cadran Nou- 
veau,” 1631 ; the other was the application of Ze screw to exact measures, 
first made in 1640 by William Gascoigne, who died at the early age of 
twenty-four, on the field of Marston Moor, while fighting for Charles I. 
Gascoigne placed in the eyepiece of the telescope a screw micrometer, and 
then attaching the telescope to a divided circle, he presented to science 
an instrument capable of making the exact measurements which subse-