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were self-tutored. That many achieved great success was due rather to the fact that the country needed them and they were instinctive engineers, than that they were "practically educated." With the advent of the well-trained college graduate the self-tutored men are not so highly thought of as was once the case. Prior to the civil war there was considerable activity in railway building, and the engineering schools of the country were so few that it was hard to hold the graduates of West Point and Annapolis in the service of the army and navy, their education being so good along the lines of applied science. General McClellan, a graduate of West Point was chief engineer and manager of a railway when the war broke out. After the war ended the whole country, especially the west, experienced such a boom and there was so much railway building that the schools were again unable to supply enough engineers, so boys with the most elementary training were placed at drafting boards and bright young fellows were given a few lessons in handling surveying instruments, the result being that the country in dull times was crowded with "engineers," many of whom were hardly more than automatons, doing all the routine work connected with railway surveying and building in a mechanical manner. One panic period lasting three or four years sufficed to enable the engineering schools, enormously increased in numbers from the half dozen existing in the late 60's,