The question now before us is, how should we modify our present methods of technical education to meet these problems. Remember that we are to train the student to accommodate himself to the new in experience. It is the problems of tomorrow that he must learn to master, but he must also be made to see how these problems arise from the past. He cannot properly understand them unless he can grasp the general trend of their development. His is the business of interpolation. Knowledge is behind him. Theory, the throbbing artery of experience, is to project the curves of development into the future. To know what to do next the student must know what has been done. To properly interpret the meaning of the new in experience, give it its correct classification, he must be able to pick up the separate threads of his knowledge and hold them each together in the unity of a single apperceptive span. This I have tried to make evident in my paper.

For this reason, if none other, I believe that the history of the development of engineering should form a material portion of our studies. The student should never be allowed to take up the new till he has been able to infer it from the past, or the new should be taught as an integral part of the old.

As I have earlier said, experience should come to the student in the crude, just as it will in after life, and not from textbooks. Let him place it if he can. Show him how experience is organized if you will, but never, unless in the last extremity, furnish him a copy that he can imitate, part for part. The world is not a laboratory where everything needed is close

at hand. Man must do the best with what he can find. Make it necessary for him to devise means to an end. Then when he has attempted a solution, aid him to find what is a true or a better solution. In other words, from first to last develop the student's originality. Further, make the student prepare his own textbooks. My observation is that the printed text serves for very little more than a source of income to the writer. The average student remembers only what he has been compelled to think out and write down for himself. His textbook should be adapted to his own individual needs.

These are merely in the way of suggestions, and I do not doubt that some of them may seem impractical. But it seems to me that we are facing an acute situation. Our schools must be adapted primarily to meet the actual needs of mental development. The science of psychology is too far advanced for us to ignore it. Our educational systems must be organized so that they will not run counter to, but will apply, the laws of conscious evolution.

So much has been written on the organization of the teaching staff, that it seems quite hopeless to state anything original. I can only attempt to accent what has of recent years become a settled conviction among adequate judges. The head of the department must be a man thoroughly conversant with the actual life of his profession-not a mere academician, but an individual of wide, practical knowledge. His principal duty is to outline the course and instruct his assistants. The assistants are to be men chosen not merely on account of their desire to teach, but on

Teaching is a pro

The teacher needs

account of their ability to teach. fession and a most difficult one. more than engineering knowledge, he must also be trained in the rudiments of his own profession. Now I realize the difficulty of procuring men of this type, and I therefore desire to suggest that room be made in your faculties for a trained educator-a man who has risen through the ranks-preferably drawn from a high school-a psychologist-a student of mental and moral development-a logician-a philosopher. His lectures on applied logic and metaphysics should follow the course in natural physics. He is to teach the students to criticise their own conceptions-to analyze their own experience.

I have been asked to mention some textbooks on logic and philosophy suitable for use in technical schools. You have my opinion of textbooks in general, and I can only add that I see no necessity for their introduction, except as reference works to which the student may be directed for a more detailed elaboration than can be attempted in the classroom. I am free to confess that at present I know of no work, either in logic or philosophy, that has been drawn with direct reference to this end.

My own idea is that until this want is filled, "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy" by Josiah Royce, Jevon's "Logic" as revised by Hill, and Erdman's "Outlines of Logic and Metaphysics" would prove interesting and valuable reading for the student, while Baldwin's "Mental Development in the Child and the Race," and "Social and Ethical Interpretations," together with Royce's "The World and the Individual,”

should be in the hands of every teacher. The "Principles of Logic," by F. H. Bradley, is perhaps in the main as true a formal exposition of the operations of our thought as has been written within the past twenty-five years, although more suited to the needs of the teacher than the needs of the student. For an able and stimulating criticism of the fundamental conceptions of science I would suggest Ladd's "Theory of Reality."

A man does not learn to think accurately by "browsing around in books." He learns to think by example and necessity. Logic and philosophy are systematic summaries of racial mental attitudes. Produce the attitude and philosophy follows as a matter of necessity. The courses in logic and philosophy ought to be incorporated into the general structure of the teaching system. Stress should be laid upon the fact that knowledge hangs together on systematic thinking, and that science is the expression of such thought.

If you adjust your methods of teaching to the order of development of the brain functions, and seek to develop the apperceptive powers so that the experience stimulates desire and effort, the student will want to learn, and your battle will be all but won. The crying need of modern technical education is not better laboratories, but better teachers.

ENGINEERING EDUCATION BEFORE AND

AFTER THE WAR.

BY J. BURKITT WEBB,

Professor of Mathematics and Mechanics, Stevens Institute of
Technology.

This paper, and no doubt many others, you owe to the effort and tact of your excellent Secretary. He sent me two things: a list of one hundred suggested subjects, so many of which would have suited that nothing would have been written, and a personal letter asking for a historical paper with reminiscences, telling the younger men the trouble of getting an education in my younger days and something about the "giants that there were in those days." It was easier to say "yes" than "no" and a title was hastily chosen, which we must now try to justify.

To see if the Civil War had any noticeable effect on technical education, a graphical table of technical schools was made with the years of the last century as abscissas and the number of schools in the United 'States in each year as ordinates and a logarithmic curve was drawn. There is a slight depression or break during the war and the increase is very rapid after it, but the main variations are perhaps from financial causes.

My own education was commenced before the war and finished after it. In Professor Baker's presidential address before our Society he speaks of there being six such institutions before the war, but there PROCEEDINGS, Vol. VIII., p. 11.