or no a young man or a young woman should secure a university education, I can do no better than reflect the views here of the late President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University, who wrote: 66 Nobody can tell how it comes to pass that men of extraordinary minds are born of commonplace parentage and bred in schools of adversity, away from books and masters. Institutions are not essential to their education. But everyone who observes in a series of years the advancement of men of talents, as distinguished from men of genius, must believe that the fostering diet of the university - its plain living and high thinking — favor the growth of scholars, investigators, reasoners, statesmen of enduring reputation, poets and discoverers. Such men are rarely produced in the freedom of the wilderness, in the publicity of travel or trade, or in the seclusion of private life; they are not the natural product of libraries and museums when these stand apart from universities, they are rarely produced by schools of the lower grade.” And in concluding this chapter a few words on the subject of graduate instruction may not be amiss. It appears to be the tendency of technical and engineering scholars to recognize that certain types of students should without question pursue one or two additional years of special study in fact it has been suggested that the serious and intensive types of workers be collected near the end of their fourth year at college and be either given a scholarship or be substantially assisted in securing the ways and means to pursue their graduate studies. The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education has been, and is still, doing work of a most valuable nature in connection with the molding of university courses. At one of its recent meetings it invited the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Chemical Society to appoint delegates to the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, thereby forming a joint committee on engineering education and engineering research as taught in the undergraduate and graduate schools of the country. This committee invited the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to take part in the work, which it has done in a very handsome manner, and the result of its coöperation has recently been published in its Bulletin #11, by Professor Charles Riborg Mann. In selecting an institution for graduate study it is, of course, rational to select the university with a reputation for strength in the particular line of activity in which the student intends to specialize. "In the realm of physics," writes Dr. Richard C. Maclaurin, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "an Englishman who has selected his life work does not go to Cambridge, but to J. J. Thompson or to Larmor, just as a Scotsman did not go to Glasgow but to Kelvin, nor a German to Berlin but to Helmholtz. Our men are learning this lesson slowly, but they still go far too much to Harvard or Yale or to Columbia." Τ' CHAPTER VI Some Borderline Limits HE present chapter is written primarily for the benefit of skeptics, and espe cially is it addressed to those who, in the light of the world's phenomenal progress in science, still cling as it were to the old-fashioned conservatism. We used to express ourselves very freely as to the possibility of this, or the impossibility of that, but it takes a brave man today, if he has any reputation at all to lose, to come out into the open and say it cannot be done. 66 'The man who once most wisely said, 'Be sure you're wrong before you quit.'" Let us consider some old-fashioned borderline limits in connection with a few accomplished facts, and for the first illustration the art of mechanical flight furnishes a most typical case. The great Lord Kelvin, one of the profoundest mathematical physicists that ever lived, wrote in 1896 to Colonel Baden Powell "I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation 118 other than ballooning, or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the aeronautical society." Just to think that a mind as keen as Kelvin's should have been duped by pseudo borderline barriers, and that other great scientists followed closely in his footsteps. Le Conte, the illustrious geologist, is blamed for his skeptical remarks in retarding the realization of mechanical flight, for it was his stupid theory that no machine could exceed in size the largest of his fossil birds! All the way down through the annals of history, including Darius Green and his flying machine, through the unhappy time when the American newspapers and the people ridiculed dear old Professor Langley into his grave just as he was making his master strokes which have immortalized his name, 66 everybody was expert, poets and mechanics, bible students and governments." And perhaps it is proper in this connection to suggest to the reader to avoid this word "expert." I have always steered clear of it and its pompous atmosphere, and I try to avoid it even when testifying in court in technical cases, in making expositions of prior art or in giving my opinions. I like nothing better than to lie in wait to put scientific questions to the pompous type who |