others--and to the graduate who "gets" this truism will come all things
of this life, not the least of which will be material rewards.

VII

THE CONSULTING ENGINEER

The consulting engineer represents the pinnacle, as it were, of
professional success. The inventor is something else--a wilding in the
profession--and as such cannot be considered in a paper of this kind,
save only as to say that he is the presiding genius among engineers, the
Shakespeare or Milton among his kind, a man whose path to the heights is
nowhere known of men. The consulting engineer, on the contrary,
representing, as he does, the zenith of slowly attained power in some
certain branch of engineering, a vantage--point open freely to all, is
the embodiment of the goal toward which all graduates should strive. The
consulting engineer has perfected himself in his chosen field; he has
become an authority in his branch of engineering; his word is accepted
as final in court and privy council. Having gained to this enviable
position only after prolonged study and protracted and wide experience
in his particular specialty, the consulting engineer has well earned
whatever accrues to him in the way, among other things, of generous fees
for his services.

Still, there are consulting engineers who have become so through
accident. The writer personally knows a consulting engineer who was
following a general engineering practice when called upon one day to
advise a group of capitalists in the matter of a garbage-disposal plant
of new design for a large mid-Western city. His services were sought not
because he was a garbage expert, but rather because he was expert in
intricate pipe layouts and the like. However, once he got his hand into
garbage disposition on a large scale, he remained in this branch of
engineering, eventually traveling about the country supervising the
design of similar plants whose object was the economical disposal of
municipal refuse. Practically alone in the field, his writings soon
became accepted as authoritative, and yet the whole thing began with
that first call, quite by chance, in a matter foreign to the subject.
Like other professional men, engineers never know when the heavens will
open for their particular benefit.

Yet these cases are rare. The average consulting engineer is a man who
has won to pre-eminence only through protracted study and hard work in
one line. He is a specialist with a high reputation for accuracy