your college course. Try to find a chum who is in another department; go to literary societies; haunt the library; attend the available lectures in literature, science, and art, attend the meetings of the Science Club; and in every way possible, with a peep here and a word there, improve to the utmost these marvelous opportunities which will never come to you again. Think not of tasks; call no assignments by such a name. Call them opportunities, and cultivate a hunger and thirst for all kinds of humanistic knowledge outside your particular world of dead matter, for you will never again have such an opportunity, and you will be always thankful that you made good use of this, your one chance in a lifetime.

For your own personal happiness, and that of your immediate associates, secure in some way, either in college or after leaving the same, an acquaintance with the world's best literature, with the leading facts of history, and with the biographies of many of the greatest men in pure and applied science, as well as of statesmen and leaders in many fields. With this knowledge of great men, great thoughts, and great deeds, will come that lively interest in men and affairs which is held by educated men generally, and which will put you on an even footing with them in your daily intercourse.. This kind of knowledge also elevates and sweetens the intellectual life, leads to the formation of lofty ideals, helps one to a command of good English, and in a hundred ways refines, and inspires to high and noble endeavor. This is the cultural education leading to that appreciation and enjoyment man is assumed to possess.

Think not, however, that I depreciate the peculiar

work of the engineering college. It is by this kind of education alone that America has already become supreme in nearly all lines of material advancement. am only anxious that the men who have made these things possible shall reap their full share of the benefits.

In conclusion let me congratulate you on having selected courses of study which will bring you into the most intimate relations with the world's work of your generation. All life to-day is one endless round of scientific applications of means to ends, but such applications are still in their infancy. A decade now sees more material progress than a century did in the past. Not to be scientifically trained in these matters is equivalent to-day to a practical exclusion from all part and share in the industrial world. The entire direction of the world's industry and commerce is to be in your hands. You are also charged with making the innumerable new discoveries and inventions which will come in your generation and almost wholly through men of your class. The day of the inventor, ignorant of science and of nature's laws, has gone by. The mere mechanical contrivances have been pretty well exhausted. Henceforth profitable invention must include the use or embodiment of scientific principles with which the untrained artisan is unacquainted. More and more will invention be but the scientific application of means to ends, and this is what we teach in the engineering schools. Already our patent office is much puzzled to distinguish between engineering and invention. Since engineering proper consists in the solution of new problems in the material world, and invention is likewise the discovery of new ways of doing things,

they cover the same field. But an invention is patentable, while an engineering solution is not. Invention is supposed in law to be an inborn faculty by which new truth is conceived by no definable way of approach. If it had not been reached by this particular individual, it is assumed that it might never have been known. An engineering solution is supposed, and rightly, to have been reached by logical processes through known laws of matter, and force, and motion, so that another engineer, given the same problem, would probably have reached the same or an equivalent result. And this is not patentable. Already a very large proportion of the patents issued could be nullified on this ground, if the attorneys only knew enough to make their case. More and more, therefore, are the men of your class to be charged with the responsibility and to be credited with the honor of the world's progress, and more and more is the world's work to be placed under your direction. The world will be remade by every succeeding generation, and all by the technically educated class. These are your responsibilities and your honors. The tasks are great and great will be your rewards. That you may fitly prepare yourself for them is the hope and trust of your teachers in this college of engineering.

I will close this address by quoting Professor Huxley's definition of a liberal education. Says Huxley: "That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any

kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who," no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

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Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely she as his ever beneficient mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter."

XII

Disinterestedness

By Francis A. Walker 1

THE growth of scientific and technical schools on this continent during the past thirty years has savored. of the marvelous. In part, it has been due to the changed ideas and the transfigured ideals of the American people; in part, to the recognized need of greater skill and more of scientific knowledge for the development of the natural resources of the continent. and for the direction of its growing enterprises. In this movement of the age, even the older institutions have been compelled profoundly to modify their traditional courses of study, substituting scientific and even technical instruction for much that was formerly deemed essential to a liberal education.

1 This short address was delivered by General Walker at the dedication of the new science and engineering buildings of McGill University, Montreal, February 24, 1893. It was published in the Technology Quarterly, the journal of the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in April of the same year, and is reprinted here by permission of the Secretary of the Society..

Francis Amasa Walker, 1840-1897, was a graduate of Amherst; he entered the Civil War as Sergeant-major of the 15th Massachusetts Infantry and was mustered out as Brigadier-general. He was successively a teacher, an editorial writer on the Springfield Republican, and an employee of the government in statistics and census work. From 1872 to 1880 he served as Professor of Political Economy in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, and was President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1881 until his death in 1897.-Editor.