562 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
fore involve, first, descriptive and explanatory instruction, which shall 
discuss these conditions of service, shall record successful achievement, 
and shall present and explain empirical formulas. 
The second line, based somewhat on the first, but having its own spe- 
aial peculiarities, must aim at a broad and far-reaching training which 
shall make a man competent not only to repeat the achievement of a 
oioneer, but competent to predict, on the basis of past performance, what 
will be the action and result of new combinations in advance of experience. 
[t is a man with this latter capacity who is the engineer. 
There is no question that this second division is the most important. 
The first division is most admirably provided for by the engineers’ 
pocketbooks and handbooks of formule, but we are unwilling at this 
date to say that a knowledge of pure science and a shelf-full of hand. 
books will make an engineer. We have a safe and conservative plodder 
and subordinate, but we have not a man of resources, nor have we the 
rest man that could be made. 
Permit the digression to say that by the foregoing it is not intended to 
andervaluc the pocketbooks. The engineering student should be taught 
to use them wisely and accurately, as a part of his school training in the 
drawing-room. But exactly as his knowledge of the use of the slide rule 
cannot be permitted to take the place of drill in the use of logarithms, so 
the handbook cannot be used exclusively, to the exclusion of individual 
responsibility and thought, without a tendency narrowing and belittling 
in its character so far as the man himself is concerned. 
The thesis of this paper, then, is that the applied mathematics, includ- 
mg engineering, is as efficient a means of educating a man as any study of 
the curriculum ; and the reason for this is that the study of engineering 
gives a scope and an occasion for the development of the reasoning 
sowers, of the critical faculty, and of the power of intelligent and wise 
choice, and that the development of these powers will result in a stronger 
man, a more reliable and firm character, and a broader grasp of the sig- 
aificance of professional opportunity. 
It has been conceded that a fundamental defect attaching to the study 
of languages, either classic or modern, is their tendency to overtrain the 
memory for verbal forms and syntactical peculiarities at the expense of 
those mental capacities of judgment, criticism, or selection which have 
most to do with the affairs of everyday life. It is this which lies at the 
bottom of satire upon the unworldly helplessness of merely literary pro- 
fessors and others, and which has again given sting to the valuelessness 
of a scholar’s training as it used to be, as a fitting school for technical 
affairs and business. If our principle is right, it explains why, under a 
system of marks, in a purely classical course, the man who ranked first in 
a class graded upon ability to cope with the intricacies of grammar should 
rarely have been as successful in winning reputation as some less con-