Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

The Foundery and Smithy are Ancient, the Machine-tool Shop is Modern. — The Giant, Steam, reduced to Servitude. — The Iron Lines of Progress. — They converge in the Shop; its triumphs from the Watchspring to the Locomotive. — The Applications of Iron in Art is the Subject of Subjects. — The Story of Invention is the History of Civilization. — The Machine-maker and the Tool-maker are the best Friends of Man. — Watt’s Great Conception waited for Automatic Tools; their Accuracy. — The Hand-made and the Machine-made Watch. — The Elgin (Illinois) Watch Factory. — The Interdependence of the Arts. — The Making of a Suit of Clothes. — The Anteroom of the Machine-tool Laboratory. — Chipping and Filing. — The File-cutter. — The Poverty of Words as compared with Things. — The Graduating Project. — The Vision of the Instructor.

The transition from the laboratories for founding and forging to the Machine-tool Laboratory symbolizes a mighty revolution in the practical arts—a revolution so stupendous as to defy description, and so far-reaching as to appall the spirit of prophecy. The foundery and the smithy date back to the dawn of history; the machine-tool shop is a creation of yesterday. About the early manipulations of iron mythology wove a web of fancy: Vulcan forged Jove’s thunderbolts, the iron sword of the savage was a god, and even far down the course of time, late in the Middle Ages, Tancred, the crusader, paid an almost fabulous sum for King Arthur’s famous sword Excalibar—but the modern machine-tool shop is a huge iron automaton, without sentiment, and possessing no poetry except the rhythmic harmony of motion. In this shop steam is reduced to servitude, and compelled with giant hands to bore, mortise, plane, polish, fashion, and fit great masses of iron, and, anon, with delicate fingers to spin gossamer threads of burnished steel. With the hot steam coursing through its steel-ribbed veins the brain of this automaton thinks the thoughts foreordained by its inventor; its hands do his bidding, its arms fetch and carry for him, its feet come and go at his beck and nod. This automaton feeds on iron, steel, copper, and brass, and produces the watch-spring and the locomotive, the revolver and the Krupp gun, the surgeon’s lancet and the shaft of a steamship, the steel pen and the steam-hammer, the vault-lock and the pile-driver, the sewing-machine and the Corliss engine. The lever which wakens this automaton to life, which endows its brain with genius and its fingers with cunning, is the rod of empire. All the lines of modern development converge in the machine-tool shop, and they are all lines of iron, whether consisting of a fine wire strung on poles in mid-air or of huge bars resting on the solid earth. Iron is the king of metals but the slave of man. Its magnetic quality guides the mariner on the sea, and its tough fibre and density sustain the weight of the locomotive on the land. It constitutes the foundation of every useful art, from the plough of the husbandman to the Jacquard loom of the weaver. But it is only in the machine-tool shop that the great steam-driven machines of commerce and manufacture can be produced. The ancients possessed iron, which they cast in the foundery and forged in the smithy; they knew the power of steam, and the magicians of the time amused the populace with exhibitions of it, but they had no machine-tool shops in which steam could be harnessed for the journey across continents and seas. The thousand and one modern applications of iron to the needs of man have originated in the machine-tool shop. It is through these applications of iron, not through iron itself, that human pursuits have been so widely diversified, and human powers so richly developed and enlarged.

The contrasts presented by the development of the useful arts during the last hundred years are startling: The toilsome journey of a day reduced to an hour with the maximum of comfort; the few yards of fabric painfully woven by hand expanded into webs of cotton, linen, woollen, and silk cloths, rolling from thousands of steam-driven looms; the stocking once requiring hours to make, now dropping second by second from the iron fingers of the knitting-machine; the nails, screws, pins, and needles, forged one by one in the old village smithy, now flying from the hands of automatic machines by the thousand million; the numberless stitches of the sewing-machine as compared with the few of the olden time, which made the fingers and the hearts of women ache; the vast crop of cereals planted, cultivated, and gathered into barns with iron hands in contrast with the toilsome processes of even fifty years ago. These are only a few of the many illustrations that might be given of progress in the useful arts, and they all emanate from the machine-tool shop.

At the threshold of the most important inquiry that ever occupied the mind of man stand the twenty-four students we have followed, with more or less regularity, through the various laboratories which constitute the preliminary steps in the manual training course. It is the most important inquiry that ever engaged the attention of man, because it touches modern civilization at more points than any other. It consists of an investigation into the subject of the diversity of the applications of iron in art, a study both of the minute and the ponderous in iron tools and machines, and it is by these tools and machines that the bulk of the great enterprises of the men of modern times are carried forward. These students are familiar with the details of the laboratories for founding and forging, but the manipulations of those branches of iron manufacture are coarse and heavy as compared with those of the Machine-tool Laboratory. In a word, the difference between the iron manipulations of the Machine-tool Laboratory and those of the founding and forging laboratories is the exact measure of the difference between the modern and the ancient systems of civilization.

The ancient civilizations culminated in that of Rome. The Romans possessed iron, but confined their manipulations of it to the foundery and the smithy. Under the Roman empire the enterprises of man—commercial, manufacturing, and industrial generally—reached the limit marked by the applications of iron to the useful arts. It is not important in this connection to inquire why inventions and discoveries ceased. It is enough that they ceased. There was a pause; man, risen to a giddy height, looked backward instead of forward and upward; the struggle to advance came to an end, ambition died out of life, and a saturnalia of bloody crime and savage brutality ensued. Exhaustion followed, then stagnation, moral and intellectual, and then the decay of all the arts. The world stood still, and in that state of quiescence remained until printing was invented and America discovered. Still it waited two hundred and fifty years before receiving the first hint of steam-driven machines and the machines and the machine tool-shop, and during all that time progress was painfully slow. Something was required to give to human ambition a grand impulse, and to open to human energy and industry a broad field. That something did not come until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it should never be forgotten that it came then through the humble men of the workshop. To their inventive genius mankind owes more than to all the philosophers, litterateurs, professors, and statesmen of all time. These men of the workshop—Huntsman, Cort, Roebuck, Watt, Fulton, Mushet, Hargreaves, Neilson, Whitney, Bramah, Maudslay, Clement, Murray, Roberts, the Stephensons, father and son, and Nasmyth—invented machines which seem to rival human intelligence, and in fact far excel human precision in the execution of their work. In endowing iron with the cunning of genius and the terrific power of the fabled cyclops, the modern mechanic has revolutionized the field of human effort, transferring it from the foundery and the smithy to the machine-tool shop. It is here, and here alone, that steam-driven machines can be made. They may be conceived in the mind of a Watt or a Stephenson, but they can be made only by the automatic tools of a Maudslay, a Clement, a Bramah, or a Nasmyth. Man was helpless without steam-driven machines, and he could not have steam-driven machines until machine-made tools had been devised with which to make them. The experience of Watt strikingly illustrates this point. When he had completed his invention of the steam-engine, he found it nearly impossible to realize his idea in a working machine, owing to the incompetency of the workmen of that time. In reply to the inquiry of Dr. Roebuck, “What is the principal hinderance in erecting engines?” he responds, “It is always the smith-work.” His first cylinder, made of hammered iron soldered together by a whitesmith, was a complete failure. But even such workmen were so scarce that upon the death of this “white-iron man” Watt was reduced almost to a state of despair. “His next cylinder was cast and bored at Carron, but it was so untrue that it proved next to useless. The piston could not be kept steam-tight, notwithstanding the various expedients which were adopted of stuffing it with paper, cork, putty, pasteboard, and old hats.” Smeaton, the best workman of the time, “expressed the opinion, when he saw the engine at work, that notwithstanding the excellence of the invention it could never be brought into general use because of the difficulty of getting its various parts manufactured with sufficient precision.” Watt constantly complained of “villanous bad workmanship.” “Machine-made tools were unknown, hence there were no good tools. Attempting to run an engine of the old regime, the foreman of the shop gave it up in despair, exclaiming, “I think we had better leave the cogs to settle their differences with one another; they will grind themselves right in time.” Contrast with this clumsy machine of the hand-tool era the Corliss engine of the present day, whose every movement possesses the noiseless grace of a woman and the conscious power of a giant; and this giant springs full-armed from the machine-tool shop as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jupiter. Mr. Smiles says, “When the powerful oscillating engines of the Warrior were put on board that ship, the parts, consisting of some five thousand separate pieces, were brought from the different workshops of the Messrs. Penn & Sons, where they had been made by workmen who knew not the places they were to occupy, and fitted together with such precision that so soon as the steam was raised and let into the cylinders the immense machine began as if to breathe and move like a living creature, stretching its huge arms like a new-born giant; and then, after practising its strength a little, and proving its soundness in body and limb, it started off with the power of above a thousand horses, to try its strength in breasting the billows of the North Sea.”

The great and small tools, the automata of the machine-shop, are no less triumphs of mechanical genius than the “powerful oscillating engines of the Warrior.” The prime difficulty of the hand-worker was to make two things exactly alike, then followed the impossibility of making many things—the narrow limit of human capacity to produce. At that point the inventor appeared with a machine which would make a thousand things in the time the hand-worker required to make one, and each one of them the exact counterpart of every other.

A hundred years ago John Arnold, the inventor of the chronometer, accomplished a marvel of patience and ingenuity in the form of a watch the size of twopence and the weight of sixpence. The workmanship was so delicate that he was compelled not only to fashion every part with his own hand, but to design and make the tools employed in its construction. The watch was presented to George III., of England, who showed his appreciation of Arnold’s mechanical skill in a present of five hundred guineas. The Emperor of Russia offered Arnold $5000 for a duplicate of the wonderful little time-piece, which offer was, however, declined. It was so difficult for the expert watch-maker of a century ago to make two things exactly alike, that Arnold could not afford to undertake to make another miniature watch even for the exorbitant price of $5000. But for ten dollars the Elgin (Illinois) National Watch Company will supply the Emperor of Russia with a machine-made watch more nearly perfect than Arnold’s masterpiece, and on the same day turn out one thousand others exactly like it. Imagine yourself now in the watch factory of the Elgin Company; observe that artisan holding in his hand a coil of fine steel wire weighing a pound. He approaches a machine, places one end of the wire in its iron fingers, presses a lever, and in a few minutes the coil is converted into two hundred thousand minute screws, each and every one as perfect as the best that Arnold made for his George III. gem.

It is with the greatest effort of painstaking care that the expert sewing-woman draws two stitches closely resembling each other, yet while she is making the toilsome exertion of her utmost skill the sewing-machine sets hundreds of stitches so exactly alike that a microscopic examination would fail to detect the least dissimilarity.

The sewing-machine affords an admirable illustration of the interdependence of the practical arts. The sewing-woman was able to keep pace with the slow and toilsome processes of the distaff and loom, but upon the application of steam-power to spinning and weaving the demand for sewing was augmented a thousand-fold. If the sewing-machine has not emancipated woman from the drudgery so pathetically depicted by Tom Hood, it has multiplied the production of garments almost beyond the power of figures to express. Note this instance illustrative of the triumph of automatic machinery in its application to manufactures. “The Emperor of Austria was lately presented with a suit of clothes possessing this remarkable history: The wool from which the garments were made was clipped from the sheep only eleven hours before the suit was completed. At 6.08 in the morning the sheep were sheared; at 6.11 the wool was washed; at 6.37 dyed; at 6.50 picked; at 7.34 the final carding process was finished; at eight o’clock it was spun; at 8.15 spooled; at 8.37 the warp was in the loom; at 8.43 the shuttles were ready; at 11.10 seven and three-fourth ells of cloth were completed; at 12.03 the cloth was fulled; at 12.14 washed; at 12.17 sprinkled; at 12.31 dried; at 12.45 sheared; at 1.07 napped; at 1.10 brushed; and at 1.15 prepared and ready for the shears and needle. At five o’clock the suit, consisting of a hunting-jacket, waistcoat, and trousers, was finished.”

There is a sort of anteroom to the Machine-tool Laboratory with which the students are thoroughly familiar. It is called the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory, has twenty-four vises, a great assortment of cold-chisels and files, and is devoted to vise work. The course in the Chipping Filing and Fitting Laboratory consists of a score or more lessons involving various file and chisel manipulations, as, “filing to line,” “dovetailing,” “parallel fitting tongues and grooves,” “ring-work and free-hand filing,” “chipping bevels,” “ward-filing and key-fitting,” “screw-filing,” “scraping,” etc., each lesson being so devised as to insure the introduction of variously shaped tools, and their application to the forms of work for which they are designed.

This anteroom to the Machine-tool Laboratory is like most anterooms plain in its appointments, and it is also like the conventional anteroom, a place where the student does not desire to remain long. The witchery of the great laboratory beyond has already cast its spell over the boy at the vise. But there is excellent hand and eye training work in the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory.

The file is a humble tool, but it is older than history, dating back to the Greek Mythological period. “From the smallest mouse-tail file used in the delicate operations of the watch and philosophical instrument maker, to the square file for the smith’s heaviest work, there is a multifarious diversity in shape, size, and gauge of cutting.” Some of the files made by the Swiss for the watch-maker “are of so fine a cut that the unaided eye cannot discern the ridges.”

In no department of the useful arts did the hand-worker attain to greater dexterity than in file-cutting. With a sharp-edged chisel the file-cutter made from one hundred and fifty to two hundred “burs” a minute, and they were so fine as to be traced by the sense of touch alone, but as straight as though ruled by a machine. The hand-working file-cutter held his ground until 1859, when a Frenchman, M. Bernot, invented a file-cutting machine which superseded the old method of manufacture, except in cases requiring delicacy of manipulation, reducing the cost of files to one-eighth of their former price.

The lessons in the Machine-tool Laboratory will not be described in detail as in the other laboratories. The processes are so delicate and so intricate, and the resulting products in machines so closely approach the marvellous, as to beggar description. The poverty of words as compared with things asserts itself with unexampled force in the presence of a great variety of tools, each of which seems to be endowed with the power of reflection, and each of which, instead of whispering a word in your ear, drops into your hand a thing of use to man.

The laboratory is silent, the tools are dumb, but how eloquently they proclaim the era of comfort and luxury! They have no tongue, but through their lips you shall speak across continents and under seas. They have no legs, but through their aid you shall, in a race round the world, outstrip Mercury. The machines they make shall bear all your burdens; with their brawny arms they lift a thousand tons, and with their fingers of fairy-like delicacy pick up a pin; with the augur of Hercules they bore a channel through the mountain of granite, and with a Liliputian gimlet tunnel one of the hairs of your head.

These ingenious tools are worthy of careful inspection both on account of the marvels they perform and the delicacy of their construction and adjustments. One of them, a screw-engine lathe, for example, is taken to pieces, and each piece described in order that the students may be made familiar with the construction of the tool, and so rendered capable of taking good care of it. During this inspection the instructor outlines the history of the tool. The main feature is the slide-rest, invented by Maudslay while in the employ of Bramah, the lock-maker. It is not too much to say that two things exactly alike, or near enough alike, practically, to serve the same purpose very well, were never produced on the old-fashioned turning lathe. This the instructor endeavors to make clear to the class. He also explains precisely how Maudslay’s improvement remedied the defects of the old-fashioned lathe. Still there remained something to be done to make it perfect, and putting the pieces together the instructor shows where Maudslay’s work ended and that of Clement began. Clement made two improvements in the slide-rest, one involving the principle of self-correction, for which he received the gold Isis medal of the Society of Arts in 1827, and the other consisting of the “self-adjusting double-driving centre check,” for which he was awarded the silver medal of the same society in 1828. Thus improved or perfected, the slide-lathe became the acknowledged king of machine-tools, the self-adjusting two-armed driver taking the strain from the centre and dividing it between the two arms, and so correcting all tendency to eccentricity in the work.

The Machine-tool Laboratory contains a great variety of tools, of which the chief are lathes, drills, and planers; but there are many auxiliary tools, and in the advanced stages of the course a single lesson often affords opportunity for the introduction of several of them. And, as in the other school laboratories, each tool, upon its first presentation to the class, forms the subject of a brief lecture—a practical lecture too, for the instructor uses the tool while he sketches its history and perhaps that of its inventor, shows what place it holds in the order of machine-tool development, and how admirably it is adapted to its particular work, and makes suggestions as to its care. Sometimes a lesson involves the use of a drawing made by the students a year before, and the piece of iron in which it is wrought is the product of a previous lesson in forging; and it may also have been manipulated with the file or the cold-chisel, or both, in the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory.

From the first lesson in the room devoted to drawing, to the last lesson in the Machine-tool Laboratory, the course of training is orderly, consecutive. Each step contains a hint of the nature of the next step, and each succeeding step consists of a further application of the principles and processes of the last preceding step. In a word, the students follow their drawings through all the laboratories till the designs “are brought out in a finished state either in cast or wrought iron.”

The lathe is the fundamental machine-tool, but a completely equipped machine-tool laboratory includes a great variety of supplementary or auxiliary tools, a thorough knowledge of which is essential to a good mechanical education. It does not follow, because these tools are in a large degree automatic, that skill may be dispensed with in their use. Many of them are very complicated in design and construction, and they can no more be made to do efficient service under an unskilled hand than a locomotive can be made to accomplish a series of successful “runs” by an unskilled “driver.” Hence every tool in the laboratory is made the subject of an exhaustive study. The principle of mechanics involved in its construction is expounded, a practical illustration of its method of operation is given, its peculiar liability to injury is explained, and rules for its care are carefully formulated, and frequently repeated.

There is a prevalent theory that the wide application of so-called automatic tools to mechanical work largely decreases the legitimate demand for skilled mechanics, but it is fallacious. In the first place a thousand things are now made where one thing was made fifty years ago. In the second place the extensive use of steam and electricity greatly enlarges the sphere wherein accurate work becomes absolutely essential to human safety, and hence extends the field of operations of the inventive faculty. In the third place the cost of machine-tool made products having been greatly reduced, competition is proportionately intensified, thus narrowing the margin of profit, and so rendering any injury to machinery through want of skill in the operator relatively more disastrous. As a matter of fact a fine machine-tool is more liable than a watch to get out of order through careless handling, and it no more than a watch, can be properly repaired by a bungler. It follows that skill in the use of machine-tools is as essential to a successful mechanical career now, as skill in the use of hand-tools was formerly.

But another conclusion follows more irresistibly, namely—that the mechanical engineer who devotes his attention to the construction and management of massive machinery, such as pumps, hydraulic and lever presses, looms, and steam-engines, whether locomotive, marine, or other, must, in order to be master of his profession, be thoroughly familiar with every step of their construction; and such familiarity can only be acquired by a course of practical study in the machine-tool shop. It is the province of the mechanical engineer to utilize certain forces of nature in the service of man, and it is only through the machine-tool shop that such utilization can be effected. It hence follows that a practical acquaintance with the manipulations of the machine-tool shop is an essential prerequisite to a successful career in the field of higher mechanics. The man who aspires to construct any great mechanical engineering work, like the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, must know the exact mechanical power of every piece of machinery he employs, as also the exact mechanical value of every piece of iron that enters into the structure; and these things he cannot know unless he is familiar with the entire series of iron manipulations, from those of the foundery to those of the machine-tool shop.

The aspect of the Machine-tool Laboratory when in repose, so to speak, is dull and uninteresting, not to say repellant. There are twenty-four engine-lathes, as many adjustable vises, a milling machine, and a variety of auxiliary tools. The lathes are supported by dingy-looking cast-iron frames, and under each lathe there is a chest of drawers containing a set of tools. Overhead there is a wilderness of pulleys and shafting, which seems to the untrained eye to have very little relation to the machines below. The working parts of the lathes show burnished steel surfaces, which reflect coldly the glare of yellow sunlight flooding the room. If it were moonlight instead of sunlight one might summon the ghosts of those daring men who hundreds and thousands of years ago dreamed audaciously of the future of applied mechanics. Roger Bacon must have had a vision of the machine-tool shop when he said, “I will now mention some of the wonderful works of art and nature in which there is nothing of magic, and which magic could not perform. Instruments may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity than if they were full of sailors; chariots may be constructed that will move with incredible rapidity without the help of animals; a small instrument may be made to raise or depress the greatest weights; an instrument may be fabricated by which one man may draw a thousand men to him by force and against their will; as also machines which will enable men to walk at the bottom of seas or rivers without danger.”

When steam is “turned on” the aspect of the Machine-tool Laboratory is completely changed. Steam is, indeed, the arch-revolutionist; it breathes the breath of life into inanimate things—makes them think, speak, and act. The low hum of unused machinery first salutes the ear; then the students take their places. They are three years older than when we encountered them in the engine-room. They are from seventeen to twenty years of age. They are no longer boys; they are young men—robust, hearty-looking young men. Their bearing is very resolute—remarkably resolute; their attitude is erect. They are full-chested, muscular-armed, frank-faced young men. In the three years’ course now drawing to a close they have learned how to do many things, and hence they show a good degree of confidence. But the dominant expression on all the interesting young faces is, after all, one of modesty; so true is it that every acquisition of knowledge, and especially useful knowledge, not only stimulates desire to learn more, but enlightens perception as to the magnitude of the field of further inquiry. As the addition of a useful thing to the world’s stock of things creates a demand for a score more of useful things, so the addition of a fact to the student’s stock of facts not only creates a desire for more facts, but strengthens the mind for further investigation.

It may be that there are vain statesmen, philosophers, priests, and kings, but we should as little expect to find a vain mechanic as a vain scientist.

These twenty-four students may go out into the world to-morrow to make their way. Some of them will enter upon the stage of active life, others will continue their studies in higher schools of literature, science, and art; but whether they go or stay, if they have made the most of their opportunities in the Manual Training School they will have learned the lesson of modesty, and learned to respect labor, not only as a means of earning one’s daily bread, but as the most powerful and the most healthful mental and moral stimulant.

Steam is on, and the students standing at the lathes are impatient to begin. It is not a lesson in the ordinary sense. Each student works independently of special direction, for each is engaged in making a machine—the graduating project. The instructor is at hand, not to dictate but to advise, if requested. From his fund of experience as the elder scholar he will answer questions propounded by his younger fellow-students. In front of the students, parts of the working drawings may be seen. It is plain that there is to be variety in the exhibit of “projects.” There are several steam-engines, differing in model; there is a steam-pump, a punching machine, a lathe, an electric machine, and a steam-hammer.

At a sign work commences—a dozen varieties of work, emitting a dozen tones of buzzing and whizzing. The instructor’s face lights up with a pleased expression as he notes the progress of the work. There is no sign of hesitation in the class; no questions are asked; the students seem to be driving straight to the mark. The instructor’s heart swells with pride; he can trust “his boys!” He has been regarding them with an expression of affection, but now his eyes wander—they have a far-away look. He no longer sees the students, he is looking beyond them. He drops into a reclining attitude, sighs, falls into a reverie, and dreams. In his dream he sees naked savages, emerging from caves, armed with clubs, pursuing animals. These are succeeded by men bearing rude stone implements—axes and hammers—and these in turn by men armed with bows and arrows, but half-clothed with skins of beasts, and crouching and shivering beneath the shelter of the branches of a tree pulled downward and secured by clods of earth. This picture disappears, and is replaced by a pastoral scene—a vast plain covered with flocks and herds. In the foreground stands the shepherd, and in the distance his tent, consisting of skins of beasts stretched on poles, and in the tent door a woman sits pounding a fleece into felt. The shepherd, his flocks and herds, his tent, and the woman in the tent door, vanish like the mists of morning, and where the shepherd was, the husbandman is seen harvesting the golden grain; and in the shadow of the cottage which has replaced the tent a woman is grinding corn. The scene again changes—the plain has become the site of a great city. The city is protected by thick, high walls, surmounted with frowning battlements. Sentinels pace back and forth along the parapet. Huge helmets protect their heads, and their bodies are clothed in armor. Quivers full of bronze-tipped arrows depend from their shoulders; in their hands they carry long bows, and the clank, clank of their broad, two-edged, bronze swords breaks the dull, monotonous routine of their march. A brazen gate swings back noiselessly on brazen hinges, and, bowing to the sentinel, the dreamer as noiselessly glides into the city. Suddenly he feels the hot breath of the foundery furnace-fire, and is blinded by a glare of red light. Shading his eyes he sees dusky forms hurrying to and fro with ladles full of molten metal. Turning away he hears the heavy stroke of the sledge, and looking, beholds a dusty, smoky smithy. The stalwart smith drops the sledge at his side, rests one foot on the anvil-block, and wipes the sweat from his brow; the helper thrusts the cooling metal into the coals, bends to the bellows, and the forge-fire sings. At the sound of a bell the dreamer starts, the old Assyrian city falls into ruins, the ruins crumble into dust, and on this dust another city rises, flourishes, falls, and piles the dust of its ruins. Over a waste of years—twenty centuries—the dreamer’s thought flashes, and he stands in the presence of the Alexandrian mechanic-philosopher. He sees Hero in the public street, gazing abstractedly at his condensed-air fountain, and follows him into his shop or laboratory, and observes him curiously as he toys with the model of a queer little steam-engine. “This is the Iron Age, but in its infancy,” he exclaims under his breath, as his eyes wander from a fine Damascus blade hanging against the wall to some poor hand-tools lying on the working-bench. “I will speak to this old man,” he continues, “and ask him to step into my Machine-tool Laboratory, and see my boys make steam-engines; it will be a revelation to him. Come, old friend—there—look!” And the dreamer looks. Does he see double? The laboratory is unchanged; steam is still on; the whir of machinery and the buzzing sound of steam-driven tools salute the ear, and the students are all busy at their benches finishing parts of “projects” and adjusting them in their places, But there are twenty-four other men—shades of men—in the laboratory. Most of them are old; some are in working clothes, others in full dress, wearing ribbons and orders of merit. Over each student one of these shades bends with an air of absorbing attention. The dreamer recognizes Papin, Fulton, Watt, and Stephenson shadowing the students engaged in the construction of engines. They beckon Hero, and he joins the group, threading his way timidly between the lines of lathes, and looking askance at the rapidly revolving wheels and flying belts. Over the shoulders of other students are seen the faces of Maudslay, Bramah, Clement, Roberts, Whitney, Nasmyth, Huntsman, Cort, Murray, Dudley, Yarranton, Roebuck, and Whitworth, besides several unfamiliar faces. Suddenly they all gather about a nearly completed project—a stationary engine. They witness the forcing home of the last screw; they see the miniature machine made fast to the bench. Steam is let into the cylinders. The student’s flushed face is in sharp contrast with the colorless faces of the group of old men by whom he is surrounded. The piston-rod moves languidly—the machine trembles as if awaking from slumber, the shaft oscillates slowly, then faster, then regularly, like a strong pulse-beat. The project is a success—the first one completed! The student’s face turns pale—as pale as the white faces of the old men at his side. They open their lips as if to cheer him, but no sound escapes them. He breathes quick—almost gasps; his heart beats loudly; he tries to shout but cannot utter a word. At last he claps his hands! The instructor starts from his chair, rubs his eyes, and stares round the laboratory. All the students are there, gathered in a group about the finished “project,” but the ghostly shades of the old inventors have vanished like the unsubstantial fabric of a vision.

The “projects” are not all finished on the same day. Some of them are far more complicated than others, and some students are more skilled than others. All are very busy. It is not improper to ask questions relating to work on the graduating projects; the instructor is at hand to answer such questions. But it is a point of honor not to ask a question if the difficulty can possibly be otherwise overcome. Hence very few questions are asked.

The last week of the term is a very trying one to all concerned. The students are reticent and unusually silent; all are anxious, some are timid—the nervous tension is extreme. The instructor becomes taciturn under a painful sense of compulsory isolation from his class, towards all the members of which he has, for three years, sustained fraternal rather than dictatorial relations. But as the projects are, one by one, completed, the atmosphere clears. When the student realizes that his project is certain to be a success, his face brightens and he is pleased to discuss its “points” with the instructor. The instructor is delighted to resume his former relations with the class, the feeling of constraint is dispelled, and the graduation-day exercises are contemplated with confidence.