Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/88

84 schools. We need more thoroughly trained teachers of engineering, men who combine theoretical training with a wide and constantly increasing experience, men who can handle the factors of theory, practice and economics."

"Technical education," says another correspondent, "should look beyond the individual to the aggregate, and should aim to shape its activities so as to develop at the maximum number of points sympathetic and helpful relations with the industrial and engineering interests of the state. This means careful and steady effort towards the coordination of the activities of the technical school with the general condition of industry and engineering as regards its raw materials, its constructive and productive operations, its needs and demands with regard to personnel and its actual or potential trend of progress."

The coming era in engineering is less a period of discovery and invention than of application on a large scale of principles already known. Greater enterprises, higher potentialities, freer use of forces of nature, all these are in the line of engineering progress.

"The realm of physical science," says a correspondent, "has become to the practical man a highly improved agricultural land, whereas in earlier days it was a virgin country possessing great possibilities and exacting but little in the way of economic treatment."

In all forms of engineering, practise is changing from day to day; the principles remain fixed. In electricity, for example, the field of knowledge 'extends far beyond the direct limits or needs of electrical engineers.'

"The best criticism as to engineering education came formerly almost entirely from professors of science and engineering. To-day the greatest and most wholesome source of such criticism comes from those engaged in practical affairs. We have begun a regime wherein coordinated theory and practise will enter into the engineering training of young men to a far greater and more profitable extent than ever before."

"The marvelous results in the industrial world of to-day," says a correspondent, "are due largely to the spirit of 'usefulness, activity, and cooperation' that exists in each community of interests and which actuates men employing the means which applied science has so bountifully accorded. I know of no greater need of engineering education in our country to-day than that its conduct in each institution should be characterized by the same spirit of usefulness, activity and cooperation."

In mining, as in other departments of engineering, we find in the schools the same growing appreciation of the value of training at once broad, thorough and practical, and the same preference for the university-trained engineer in preference to the untrained craftsman.

The head of a great mining firm in London writes me that 'for our business, what we desire are young men of good natural