all voice within, and have urged that it be heeded. The thing is
instinct--cumulative yearnings within man of thousands of his
ancestors--and to disobey it is to fling defiance at Nature herself.
Personally, I believe that when this law becomes more generally
understood there will be fewer failures decorating park benches in our
cities and cracker-boxes in our country stores.

The profession of engineering, therefore, has its type. You may be of
this type or you may not. The type is quite pronounced, however, and you
need not go wrong in your decision. All professions and all trades have
their types. Steel-workers--those fearless young men who balance
skilfully on a girder, frequently hundreds of feet in the air--are not
to be mistaken. Rough, rugged, gray-eyed; with frames close-knit and
usually squat; generous with money, and unconcerned as to the future;
living each day regardless of the next, and _living_ it--steel-workers
are as distinct from the clerical type--slender, tall, a bit
self-conscious, fearful of themselves and of the future--I say, the
steel-worker is as different from the clerical worker as the
circus-driver is from the cleric. Their work marks them for its own, if
a man lack it upon entering the work, just as the school-room marks the
teacher in time for its own. The thing is not to be mistaken.

The successful engineer must be possessed of a certain fondness for
figures. The subject of mathematics must interest him. He must like to
figure, to use a colloquialism, and his fondness for it must be
genuine, almost an absorption. It must reveal itself to him at an early
age, too, as early as his grammar-school days, for then it will be known
as genuinely a part of him, and the outcropping of seeds correctly sown
by his ancestors. Having this fondness for mathematics, which may be
termed otherwise as a curiosity to make concrete ends meet--the working
out of puzzles is one evidence of the gift--the young man is well armed
for a successful career in the profession. He will like mathematics for
its own sake, and when, later, in college, and later still, in the
active pursuit of his chosen work, he is confronted with a difficult
problem covering strains or stress in a beam or lever or connecting-rod,
he will attack it eagerly, instead of--as I have seen such problems
attacked more than once--irritably and with marked mental effort.

The successful engineer must be a man who likes to shape things with his
h