ONE:After a few encouraging words I walked on along the solitary, deserted road, leaving the canal on the right, until a by-way took me to the bank of the Meuse, opposite the Netherland frontier village Eysden. I entered a deserted inn. After shouting for a long time, the inn-keeper appeared, looked shyly at me, remaining constantly close by the door of his room. His attitude showed that he was prepared to fly at the slightest suspicious movement on my part; but as soon as I had convinced him that I was a Netherland journalist, he became more friendly, and called his wife and daughters, so that I might tell them all I knew. They were very desirous to know how the war went ... in the Netherlands, and whether we were fighting the Germans or the English? It was very difficult to make them understand that they were under a misapprehension, but when I had at last succeeded in this, I started in my turn to ask them what they thought of my intention to go farther.
TWO:Nothing can be more unreasonable than to expect an apprentice engineer to begin by an inductive course in learning and reasoning [3] about mechanics. Even if the mind were capable of such a course, which can not be assumed in so intricate and extensive a subject as mechanics, there would be a want of interest and an absence of apparent purpose which would hinder or prevent progress. Any rational view of the matter, together with as many facts as can be cited, will all point to the conclusion that apprentices must learn deductively, and that some practice should accompany or precede theoretical studies. How dull and objectless it seems to a young man when he toils through "the sum of the squares of the base and perpendicular of a right-angle triangle," without knowing a purpose to which this problem is to be applied; he generally wonders why such puzzling theorems were ever invented, and what they can have to do with the practical affairs of life. But if the same learner were to happen upon a builder squaring a foundation by means of the rule "six, eight, and ten," and should in this operation detect the application of that tiresome problem of "the sum of the squares," he would at once awake to a new interest in the matter; what was before tedious and without object, would now appear useful and interesting. The subject would become fascinating, and the learner would go on with a new zeal to trace out the connection between practice and other problems of the kind. Nothing inspires a learner so much as contact with practice; the natural tendency, as before said, is to proceed deductively.
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neque, lacinia at tempor vitae, porta at arcu. Vestibulum
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