Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/261

Rh of industry organizing his factory, the skilled workman himself, the surgeon, the sea-captain—each and all of these, with many other representatives of human activity, are, at their best, endowed or equipped with a common habit of thought more or less directly connected with what Huxley called 'the architectural or engineering part of the business.' In other words, the more or less distinctly pronounced 'note' of modern culture is a capacity for the recognition of the universal in the particular or the reign of law in nature.

Unquestionably, the intellectual training which leads to the formation of the engineering mind, in its larger sense, affords a larger scope and capacity for pure intellectual pleasure, as well as a more permanent source of such pleasure, than is afforded, for instance, by the popular resort to light fiction. The poetry of common tilings, disclosed in enormous volume by the science of the nineteenth century, is familiar to many; but it is sealed to many more, not without a certain measure of intellectual culture, by the lack of the special training which forms the scientific habit of thought.

But, apart from the value of the engineering habit of mind regarded from the point of view of intellectual culture for its own sake, the question is at last being recognized with widespread interest as one of importance to nations struggling for industrial supremacy or stability. In Great Britain particularly, thanks in part to the large attention it received at the September meeting of the British Association not only at the hands of the president, Professor Dewar, but from the engineering and educational sections, the question is up for very general discussion in the country and, it is to be hoped, for progressive settlement. The incompetence displayed so often by British officers in South Africa has driven the British people to a severe stock taking, and that stock taking has brought into prominence a fact, more or less fully recognized by a wise minority from the time of Dr. Arnold of Bugby to the present day, namely, that the traditional methods of education in England are not conducive to the formation of trained habits of scientific thought.

Professor Perry, the president of the engineering section of the British Association, has been insisting for some time, and insisted again at the Belfast meeting, that the great fault of the traditional method is the manner in which mathematics is taught. Mensuration is dissociated too sharply from geometry, and geometry too sharply from algebra. That is to say, contrary to the example of Germany and France for nearly a century and to the more recent example of the American universities, the employment of the modern proofs of geometry has been resisted in favor of the more cumbersome and, to the average young mind, the far more difficult proofs employed by