it; secondly, because, in the interest of agriculture itself, we should educate men to develop other industries. What is the great want of the Western States at this moment? Greater agricultural production? No. What they want is the development of great and varied manufacturing-industries so near them that it shall no longer take two-thirds of a bushel of corn to carry the other third from producer to

consumer.

COLLEGE OF MECHANIC ARTS.

The act of 1862 also provides with special care for instruction in "branches relating to the mechanic arts."

If you doubt the wisdom of this, look again at the last census. There you find the manufactures of the United States valued at four thousand millions of dollars, and over two millions of persons engaged in them. Can education be made useful to this vast interest? Other nations think so and are laying out vast sums in this direction. What is the system? Young men come wishing to make themselves first-class mechanical engineers or master mechanics, or to perfect themselves in any branch of mechanical industry. Under careful instructors, they are carried through the various sciences bearing on their profession. They are taught mathematics in all their relations to mechanics; in one room they go on with the mathematical and mechanical drawing of machinery; in another with free-hand-drawing; in the laboratory they are taken through various processes bearing upon their profession. A certain number of hours every day they must give to the workshop, and there, in well-worn apron and rolled-up sleeves, they go on, under careful supervision, from the use of the simplest machinery and the plainest work to the most complicated. This is the plan in actual operation at the institution with which I am connected, as well as at the Industrial University of Illinois and elsewhere.

The purpose is to send out every year a body of young men with not merely a very high grade of theoretical instruction, but with most thorough practical instruction-men who cannot merely calculate the size of parts of a machine, but who can draw it after they have calculated it and make it after they have drawn it. These are the men whom our country sorely needs to complete the organization of its great army of industry. Indeed, I know of no more pressing national need in this country. Our land has more mechanical ingenuity in it than any other; but did you ever think of its wretched misdirection and waste, for want of industrial education? If not, stroll through the national Patent-Office. Look at a few facts. In one of our most important cities are engines for supplying that city with water, erected at vast expense. The whole amount was wasted. There is ingenuity in that vast machine, there is skill in it; but, for want of education regarding certain principles involved, the whole thing is failure and waste.

Take another case. A few years since, with a small party of our fellow-citizens, I visited the West Indies in a national ship. She was a noble vessel and her engines had cost, it is said, nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. The engines showed ingenuity; but they were so deficient in proper elements of construction that our voyage was prolonged until we were all given up as lost and had the honor to have our obituaries in the leading newspapers. The first voyage of those engines was the last. They were sold for old iron, and the sum lost on them alone was sufficient to endow the finest institution for mechanical engineering in the world.

I might multiply examples of this sort, but this is enough to show what need exists for more careful training in that direction, and I pass to a kindred department.

CIVIL ENGINEERING.

Take one among the fields of its activity. We have in the United States about seventy thousand miles of railway, and every year thousands of miles are added. I do not at all exaggerate when I say that millions on millions of dollars are lost every year by the employment of half-educated engineers. Proofs of this meet you on every side.

Lines in wrong positions, bad grades and curves, tunnels cut and bridges built which might be avoided. All of us know the story.

But this is not all. Hardly a community which has not some story to tell of great losses entailed by bad engineering in other directions. Here, it is the traffic of a great city-street interrupted for a year because no engineer can be found able to make the calculations for a "skew-arch" bridge, a thing which any graduate of a well-equipped department of engineering can do; there, it is a city subjected to enormous loss by the failure of its water-supply-system because the engineer employed made no calculation for the friction of water in the pipes; in another instance it is a whole district sickened by miasma because a half-taught engineer was intrusted with its drainage. We must prepare men for better work; and for every dollar thus laid out we shall create or save thousands.

SANITARY ENGINEERING.

Nay, we shall save lives as well as money. Mr. Baldwin Latham, in his recent book on Sanitary Engineering, and Dr. Beale, in his work on Disease Germs, show by statistics that a proper application of engineering to sewerage would save one hundred thousand lives yearly in Great Britain alone, and the same truth holds in this country. We must train men in engineering as it relates to the sanitary improvement of our great communities.

ARCHITECTURE.

Wealth and public spirit—individual and municipal-are now erecting myriads of noble buildings in all parts of our country. The number of uneducated architects is very great, the number of thoroughly-prepared architects is very small. Have you ever considered the waste attendant upon this? Every month you hear of some architectural failure that costs life and treasure. To-day it is a church-floor which gives way, and a multitude of children are taken from the ruins mangled and dead; to-morrow it is a whole city-quarter swept away by fire, because some half-taught architects knew no other way of producing architectural effect than by piling up combustible ornaments on inaccessible roofs.

Nor is that all. Our people are laying out millions on millions in buildings which, within thirty years-in the advance of taste and knowledge-will be eye-sores, and must come down. A building erected by a true architect will grow more beautiful for hundreds of years. A building erected by a sham architect will be an incubus in a quarter of a century. People are beginning to see this, and we are endeavoring to prepare men thoroughly to know the best materials, to calculate their strength in construction, and to combine material and construction according to everlasting laws, and not according to some pretty present fashion; and this is the purpose of our school of architecture.

MINING-ENGINEERING.

Few among us dream of the monstrous waste now entailed upon this country by imperfect instruction in mining-engineering and metallurgy. Take first the losses by raud. A few years since our people were asked to invest in a Nevada mine of great richness. Half-educated mining geologists had certified to its value. But certain capitalists sent a young man, carefully educated in a scientific school, to examine and report. The young man on arriving found that the mine looked well enough, but on applying more scientific tests he found that an old worthless mine had been taken; that rich sulphurets had been brought and carefully placed in it at a cost of probably a hundred thousand dollars. His report exploded the fraud, and nearly a million of dollars was saved-more than five times the sum that this scientific school received from the Government of the United States. This same gentleman also exploded a great diamond-mine-fraud of the same sort.

Let me give just one more example. A short time since Prof. Verrill, of New Haven, stepped into a bank, where he noticed a lump of iron-ore. He asked the cashier in regard to it and was told that it was iron-ore from northern New York; that they

thought they had a pretty good thing in it; that they were about to invest in it to the amount of nearly half a million. Said Prof. Verrill, "Before you do that, I think you had better have the mine examined." They inquired what necessity there was for an examination. He said so much that they sent a young graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School to look into it. He was there two weeks, and the examination cost $200. He reported that the presence of titanium rendered it utterly worthless for their purpose. In that examination he saved an amount equal to the entire endowment of the institution. Here, too, we see the use of careful training.

CHEMISTRY APPLIED TO MANUFACTURES.

More and more the chemical laboratory is becoming a great central point in industrial education. Run over but two or three points out of many. A chemical discovery in coloring matter has given us a substitute for madder and restored the great area given to cultivation of that material to the increase of material for human sustenauce. An apparently trivial application of another chemical principle has enabled Onondaga to purify its product so that it now competes with the world in the purity of its salt for the dairy. Another application has enabled another part of the State to make quantities of steel formerly undreamed of. And all this is but the beginning of the applications of chemistry to increase the well-being of the State and nation.

THE ARTS OF DESIGN.

The average visitor to an institution like that established in the State of New York will often say something like this: "I can understand the value of your libraries, collections in natural history, apparatus, models, shops, and lecture-rooms; but what use of your great draughting-rooms?"

If you answer that drawing is taught in one for civil engineers; in another for mechanical engineers; in another for architects; in another free-hand-drawing; for all these together he will say, "Why teach free-hand-drawing at all? That is rather artistic than industrial."

Is it? Look at a few recent facts. A few years since the State of Massachusetts passed a law requiring free-hand-drawing to be provided for in the public-schoolsystem throughout the State. The city of Boston did the same. State and city combined to call from the great English School for Industrial Art at South Kensington Mr. Walter Smith, at a salary of $5,000, to direct the schools of that city and State.

Mr. Smith has worked on, and the result is that already this instruction has been admirably developed. Now, why has this been done? Has the State of Massachusetts, which we have always known as so thoughtful in its legislation and education, really fallen into mere dilettanteism? Not at all. Look at a few more figures from the

census.

In 1870 the product of Massachusetts in printed cottons was over seventeen millions of dollars and her product of other goods into which the arts of design enter as a matter of first importance was doubtless even more. Massachusetts is thoughtful, as ever. She sees that other States are overtaking her in manufactures so far as quantity and quality of material are concerned, but she determines to distance them by spreading throughout her borders knowledge of the principles of beauty in design and skill in them. And she never did a wiser thing. It will tell on a multitude of industries. Why do we import such vast quantities of English, German, and Danish glassware and pottery? Because they are better in material than ours? No; but because they have a beauty in design which leads the most illiterate to choose them. Why do we import such quantities of silks and carpets and chintzes and wall-papers from France? The Cheneys make silks as good in quality on this side of the ocean as the Compagnie Lyonnaise make on the other; the Bigelows make carpets just as good in material here as the D'Aubusson factory makes there; and yet when our wives and daughters see these foreign fabrics, they immediately prefer them. Why? Simply because there

generally are in the foreign product a skill, a beauty, a taste in design, that appeal to that sense of beauty which God has implanted in the rudest of our race.

Other nations in this warfare of industry see this. England is devoting millions to art-education, in order to keep up her manufactures, and has established in the privy council a science-and art-section to direct this expenditure wisely; Germany is doing even more; France has been doing it for generations, and it has given her the supremacy thus far in a multitude of branches of manufacture.

If you wish to see how these nations have done and are doing this, look at Mr. Stetson's admirable little book on Technical Education. You will there see that Prussia alone gives industrial education in various branches to over 11,000 men.

Already the value of this is known to individuals among us. Mr. Stebbins tells us that one silverware-establishment in the city of New York pays a graduate of one of these foreign schools for making designs and patterns as high a salary as the Empire State gives its governor.

GENERAL INSTRUCTION.

And now a few words regarding the general education which goes with these various branches of industrial and scientific education. The old way in the more venerable colleges and universities was to force all students through one single classical coursethe same for all. This system the "new education" discards. General courses in literature, science, and arts are presented, as well as special courses having reference to the great industries, and the student, with the advice of friends and instructors, takes that which best suits the bent of his mind. We believe that the results are already better than those of the old system. Certainly they could not be worse. The famous BlueBook of the parliamentary commission on advanced education in England shows that, under the old system there, 70 per cent. of the students in their great schools and universities take no real hold upon classical studies. Few will claim that our system of classical instruction is better than that in England. We make no opposition to classical instruction. We agree that, for those who take earnest hold of it, it is one of the noblest means of discipline and culture; but it is no less evident that, for those who do not take hold of it, who merely "drone" over it, it is one of the worst.

INSTRUCTION IN HISTORY.

Another subject on which the "new education" lays stress is history, especially the history of our own race and country. The subject has been sadly neglected; but more and more it is seen that, to train men to build up the future, we must show them with what successes and failures their predecessors have built up the past.

INSTRUCTION IN MODERN LITERATURE.

No thoughtful man will deny that it is well to give even to students in industrial branches access to the best thoughts of the best thinkers; the study of the great modern languages and literature does this, and especially is it done by the study of this wonderful language and literature of our own.

INSTRUCTION IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES.

Another most important means of discipline and culture is to be found in the study of the natural sciences. On these much of industrial and general progress depends. They discipline the power of observation and reasoning upon observation. They give, too, a culture to the sense of beauty in form and fitness in adaptation.

METHODS.

A word in regard to certain leading methods of this system of education. I will allude to one or two. The first is the giving of great importance to the lecture-room

under this system. Any one who has had the pleasure of talking much with Prof. Agassiz can hardly fail to remember the delightfully comical way in which he pictured the ordinary system of rote-recitation from text-books. I think he did not exaggerate. It seems to me that, of all the means of obtaining discipline by study, that of textbook-recitation, which has been practiced for many years among us, is the most worth. less. More and more we are coming to the idea of stimulating thought and rousing enthusiasm in the lecture-room, and then holding men to supplementary work in the examination-room. That is one of the methods of the new system. Another is in the development of laboratory-instruction. The old way was, even in the natural sciences, to give lectures, and nothing else. It was one everlasting study about things, and not a study of the things themselves. Generally it was book in the morning, book at noon, book at night. Now we have the book, and we have the lecture-room, and, more than that, we have the chemical laboratory; the museum, which is the laboratory for the study of natural sciences; the machine-shop, which is the laboratory in the department of mechanical science; the field, which is the laboratory in the agricultural department, bringing the student face to face with the things themselves. You have the book-culture supplemented by the culture which arises from the grapple with nature itself, by which a love of the subject is stimulated and an earnestness which will incline one to turn afterward to the book with interest hardly ever excited under the old system.

And now turn to another branch of the subject: the true policy of National and stategovernments in dealing with industrial and scientific education. Many years ago that great, pure, noble man, Dr. William Ellery Channing, put forth the idea that the public lands of the United States ought to be consecrated religiously to the education of the people. Sad, indeed, is it that a policy so noble was not fully carried out. But, after all, it is matter of congratulation that it has been adopted and carried out at all. The Government of the United States has adopted the policy, and, though it has carried it out but partially, it has fostered education in our public schools by a consecration of a portion of the public domain to that purpose. It has fostered university-education in many States in the same way, and the great University of Michigan and many others are monuments of this benign policy. It has fostered academic education by the distribution of the surplus revenue to the States. And now, in the Morrill bill it has fostered industrial and scientific education by the same means. To that policy, then, the nation is committed.

The question is, what more should be done? I have endeavored to show you, very imperfectly indeed, or rather I have suggested to you, a train of thought which will enable you to see how much instruction in regard to industrial matters and in science applied to the great matters of the country may be made to bear upon the development of national wealth. But still, at this moment the provision is wretchedly poor. I do not speak for the State of New York. If any provision is made, I am ready to say, in behalf of the authorities there, that we ask not one dollar; all we ask is that there be given to various States needing it such an amount as will strengthen them and enable them to do their part in this great work.

Now, I argue that the nation and the various States must not only lay the foundations, as they have done for institutions for advanced industrial and scientific instruction, but must go on to build-upon the foundations they have already laid. I argue it, first of all, because this is the only way in which such instruction can be developed. Here I meet an argument offered before this association last summer by President Eliot, of Harvard College. In his address, taking ground against a national university he put forth an argument opposed to any national or State-aid to any system of education whatever. So truly is this the drift of President Eliot's reasoning, that at this moment Bishop McQuaid of Rochester, N. Y., is using President Eliot's argument against our whole common-school-system. Now, on the face of it, this looks to me, and I think must appear to you who are conversant with education in this country, like kicking down the ladder by which one has risen. If there is any institution that owes much