QUALITIES FOR ENGINEER

Mr. W. B. Parsons, in an interesting and entertaining stereopticon lecture in the Union, yesterday evening, on "Civil Engineering as a Career," emphasized imagination and enthusiasm as the two qualities most necessary in a man who would take up the profession of a civil engineer.

Robert Fulton, although he neither invented nor first applied the principles of the steamboat, has been hailed as its inventor simply because he had the breadth of imagination and the enthusiasm to embody the impractical ideas of his predecessors in a useful form. And he deserves the credit he is given; for, according to Lord Telford, who said, "Engineering is the art of directing the great sources and powers of nature for the use and convenience of man," he was a true civil engineer.

In one who would be successful in this profession, mere knowledge is not sufficient. A man does not conquer nature by mathematical calculations; it is the application of knowledge to existing conditions, the adaptation of theory to meet unusual circumstances that constitutes success; and to do this a man must have imagination.

But without enthusiasm, imagination is useless; for there is often nothing but a love of his work to inspire a man, when he is being balked everywhere by a combination of adverse circumstances. An engineer should always try to develop his enthusiasm, for without it he is ineffectual.

In these two essentials of the successful civil engineer Robert Fulton was supremely qualified, and it was his mastery of the possibilities as well as the principles of his invention that has made him famous when his predecessors have been forgotten