verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent,
inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering
literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or
diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on
intimate study of the ways of nature, the author's words will too often
be found vapid. This fact--engineering looks one way, and literature
another--was what my grandfather overlooked. All his life long, his pen
was in his hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself
against all possible contingencies. Scarce anything fell under his
notice but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled
it in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes
inexact and wordy, style. The Travelling Diary (so he called it) was
kept in fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up, rudely
indexed, and put by for future reference. Such volumes as have reached
me contain a surprising medley: the whole details of his employment in
the Northern Lights and his general practice; the whole biography of an
enthusiastic engineer. Much of it is useful and curious; much merely
otiose; and much can only be described as an attempt to impart that
which cannot be imparted in words. Of such are his repeated and heroic
descriptions of reefs; monuments of misdirected literary energy, which
leave upon the mind of the reader no effect but that of a multiplicity
of words and the suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling
among tangle. It is to be remembered that he came to engineering while
yet it was in the egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds
of that profession widen daily. He saw iron ships, steamers, and the
locomotive engine, introduced. He lived to travel from Glasgow to
Edinburgh in the inside of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself
had "often been twelve hours upon the journey, and his grandfather
(Lillie) two days"! The profession was still but in its second
generation, and had already broken down the barriers of time and space.
Who should set a limit to its future encroachments? And hence, with a
kind of sanguine pedantry, he pursued his design of "keeping up with the
day" and posting himself and his family on every mortal subject. Of this
unpractical idealism we shall meet with many instances; there was not a
trade, and scarce an accomplishment, but he thought it should form part
of the outfit of an engineer; and