as Captain of Battery A of the same regiment, when he was commissioned as Colonel of Engineers by Governor S. D. McEnery, and served on his staff to 1888. He became a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers in May, 1881, his number being 653, and his certificate of membership is signed by James B. Francis, the eleventh president from the date of organization in 1852. He is one of the oldest members in the South. He is a charter member, and was the first President of the Louisiana Engineering Society in 1898. Colonel Lewis has been twice married and has nine children. His first marriage was in 1880 to Miss Clara Davis, who died in 1889. In 1892 he was married to Miss Eveline Nicaud. One of Colonel Lewis' son, Mr. J. H. Lewis, has adopted his father's profession and is an assistant engineer with the United States Government. ENGINEERS AND ORGANIZATION. By DR. IRA N. HOLLIS, President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It was suggested by members of the Society that I might say something to-night to you as engineers on the subject of engineering societies and in general of those organizations that tend to give the profession more adequate representation before the public. There are some sides of engineering that rarely have a hearing. You know as well as I that for a long time we have been classified as among the utilities, as contrasted with the higher things of life, the utilities that enable men to live on this planet, but nevertheless utilities. Some writer has said that no inspiring emotions are ever derived from a machine and that no inspiring thought can come from a utility. That forms a fair text for engineers, particularly as there is no truth whatever in it. It is a onesided statement from literary men who have no conception of the ideals and thoughts of those who are educated for applied science. For twenty years I was associated very inti mately with the great faculty in the oldest university of this country, and I listened from time to time to the doctrine that applied science should not be taught in a university for general education. It seems to me then that the engineer will never come to his own until he is in a position to speak for himself, until he has learned that power of expression which will enable him to state clearly and adequately his own ideals. The truth of the matter is that there is much inspiring emotion from a machine and from every invention, no matter what the reason for its development may have been. The modern writers have written more or less satisfactorily regarding engineering. One, Rudyard Kipling, has appealed to the profession through some of his poems. McAndrews' hymn alone will refute the claim that there is no inspiring emotion from a machine. Another writer, Mr. H. G. Wells, has approached the subject of engineering in his book, "The World Set Free," and he has made a sound statement in his first sentence, when he says, "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment to external power." I want to call your attention to the significance of this statement in relation to your profession. The book itself is a piece of fiction, representing the world set free by mechanical and chemical invention; nevertheless, the prologue expresses the plain truth. The word "history" here is used in the sense of the evolution or the growth of man on this planet. It is far more than the record of wars and political changes, as it means man's development from the time the first creature who took a club in his hands began that long process by which human reason has grown to its present state. What does he mean by external power? He explains it somewhat in the prologue, yet in such a way as to prove that he does not understand the full force of his finding. External power may mean energy wholly external to man, or it may mean the appliances that enable man to use his own energy more effectively. Invention may be classified into three types. The first type reaches far back into the history of man. It involves the use of his energy without any external advantage whatever. It enables him to put into a moving body, such as a hammer or club, the kinetic energy derived from his muscular strength and to deliver that energy at some point where it may have a maximum effect. The sword is an example, and all kinds of hand tools which are constantly being invented to-day belong to the same power. The club which has been mentioned afforded man a tool or a weapon for offense and defense and thus enabled him to replace his claws and teeth in defense and attack. When he took a club in his hand, he had crossed that shadowy zone separating the creature of instinct from the being with the potential power of reasoning. The second type of invention is that which does not offer a man power outside of himself, but gives him an advantage by the reduction of external resistance. A man has a certain amount of energy within his own body, and the effect may be increased by reducing friction, as for example with the roller carrying a weight. The wheelbarrow, for instance, is a very good example of reduction in external resistace. Before its invention, two men were required to carry a burden. Whoever replaced the man in front by a wheel enabled, by that invention, one man to do as much work as two previously had been able to do; not by supplying external energy, but by reducing external friction. The wheelbarrow, therefore, was a great labor-saving invention. If any of you have read Laird's book on "The Monuments of Ninevah," you will recall therein some pictures of bas-reliefs found beneath the sand that buried the ancient city. One of them represents the transportation of a stone lion, which was to be placed at the side of an entrance to the library. It is a bas-relief, very lively in character, indicating how heavy weights were transported from place to place. The stone is placed on a sled with two runners beneath which are rollers similar to those used for moving modern houses. There are the rollers coming out at the rear, and men hurrying forward to place them under the incline at the front of the sled. Two men are at the rear of the sled with levers to jolt it for the reduction of initial friction; wrapped around the stone are great ropes which lead forward, divided into many Y's, so that a thousand men could be placed on the drag. A boatswain standing on the front end of the sled to direct the work completes a very good picture of the whole process. The work was wholly manual; no external power being supplied by any means. Someone has credited DaVinci with the invention of the wheelbarrow, but I believe this to be an error, inasmuch as the wheel and the roller were common many centuries before DaVinci was born. It repre The third type of energy is perhaps what Mr. Wells had in his mind when he referred to external power. sents what in modern engineering is called the prime mover and supplies energy wholly external to man's body. The first example is to be found in the use of a sail, although undoubtedly previous to the sail domesticated animals had been. employed in transportation. The kinetic energy of moving air was applied to the propulsion of boats and subsequently to wind-mills. It is not necessary here to go into detail, for every engineer knows the progress of invention to the modern steam-engine. Between the sail and the steam engines would come the water wheels of all types and the explosive engine, now represented by the gasoline and oil engine for all kinds of purposes. The steam-engine, however, is the culmination of a period during which comparatively little advance was In 1760, transportation on land was nearly as crude as it had been in the time of Christ. Transportation at sea had been advanced by the improvement in ships and sailcarrying capacity. Watt's improvement of the steam-engine thus made a complete change in the outlook towards the emancipation of mankind and the possibility of freeing him from hard toil. That sentence of Mr. Wells' may be stated in a different way by saying that the history of mankind is the history of engineering. In this sense, engineering is the application of science to the uses of mankind for the purpose of enabling him to live under the hard conditions imposed by nature on our planet. It was the first of the sciences, although the name itself did not come into use until the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, every effort of man towards his physical welfare may be classified under engineering until we come to the science of preventive medicine, and even that involves a large amount of engineering. Every instrument, every utensil, every weapon however simple or complicated that we have to-day was invented at some time in the history of man; and external power which has been of very slow growth from the beginning of man on the planet to the dawn of history and again from the dawn of history to James Watt has been enormously accelerated by the use of energy stored in the ground or found in the sun's rays and in water. Consequently, with a proper understanding of the word "history" and of the word "engineering," Mr. Wells would have been right in saying that the history of mankind on this planet is a history of engineering. I might go further by saying that the use of external power as we now understand it means an accelerated growth. Is it fanciful for an engineer to believe that if reasoning power |