Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/596

 practice prove to the Government and to your brethren of the Service that you are worthy of such confidence.

Graduates in Engineering. Your course has been, especially on the practical side, superior to that of most of those who preceded you. You have thus been enabled to begin your life's work on a vantage ground, and through your work in the field and in the workshop you have been able to test your real aptitude for your profession—and, if you have discovered this aptitude your profession will, I doubt not, become the passion of your lives. There are few vocations which call forth this passionate devotion like that of Engineering,—a bridge, a tower, an engine, becomes personified, an object of almost personal affection. I can well remember with what a sad heart, as of one parting from a loved child, Mr. Brassington, the designer of the noble edifice that is now rising to the north of the Fort, said farewell to that work but just begun, and I would that he may yet see its domes and minarets standing out as they now do against the rich glory of your evening skies. If you are to succeed in your profession you must not only continue the study of engineering and architectural literature, and of drawings of the noblest engineering and architectural work, but you must cultivate this enthusiastic and passionate feeling which will give you eyes to see, and a brain to imagine things, which would never strike across the brain of the uninspired engineer. To be a great engineer or a great architect you must have a powerful imagination, and that quality can be cultivated like any other of our mental gifts; you must have the power “to body forth the forms of things unknown” and then only can you by your pencil, and by your trowel give to these “airy nothings a local habitation and a name.” But remember these things only come to those who work with the hand as well as with the brain. This new feeling of the necessity of cultivating the working side of your profession is, I rejoice to think, beginning to extend to classes which have hitherto stood aloof; witness the excellent manner in which a Brahman student, the son of a distinguished member of this University, has gone through his course in Mechanical Engineering in the workshops of the Madras Railway. Only a few years have elapsed since Brahmans in Madras began to take to the profession of Medicine and Surgery, and not in a dilettante way, but with a determination to do the rough work as well as the agreeable, to regard nothing as “common or unclean,” of which their science demands a knowledge: and now, it must gladden the heart of every friend of