ONE:It may be useless or even wrong to institute invidious comparisons between different callings which are all useful and necessary, and the matter is not introduced here with any view of exalting the engineering profession; it is for some reasons regretted that the subject is alluded to at all, but there is too much to be gained by an apprentice having a pride and love for his calling to pass over the matter of its dignity as a pursuit without calling attention to it. The gauntlet has been thrown down and comparison provoked by the unfair and unreasonable place that the politician, the metaphysician, and the moral philosopher have in the past assigned to the sciences and constructive arts. Poetry, metaphysics, mythology, war, and superstition have in their time engrossed the literature of the world, and formed the subject of what was alone considered education.INTRODUCTION
ONE:Finishing as a process is a secondary and not always an essential one; many parts of machinery are ready for use when forged or cast and do not require fitting; yet a finishing shop must in many respects be considered the leading department of an engineering establishment. Plans, drawings and estimates are always based on finished work, and when the parts have accurate dimensions; hence designs, drawings and estimates may be said to pass through the fitting shop and follow back to the foundry and smith shop, so that finishing, although the last process in the order of the work, is the first one after the drawings in every other sense; even the dimensions in pattern-making which seems farthest removed from finishing, are based upon fitting dimensions, and to a great extent must be modified [119]by the conditions of finishing.
ONE:And bring to us the creatures of a day,Were the vines ranked and trimmed with pruning-knives,
