ENGINEER, PROFESSIONAL. So diversified are the services required of professional engineers throughout the wide range of industries, public utilities and governmental work, and in the discovery, development and conservation of resources, that men of extremely various personality and physique may achieve success. Qualifications include intellectual and moral honesty, courage, independence of thought, fairness, good sense, sound judgment, perseverance, resourcefulness, ingenuity, orderliness, application, accuracy and endurance. An engineer should have ability to observe, deduce, apply, to correlate cause and effect, to co-operate, to organize, to analyze situations and con ditions, to state problems, to direct the efforts of others. He should know how to inform, convince and win confidence by skillful and right use of facts. He should be alert, ready to learn, open-minded, but not credulous. He must be able to assemble facts, to investigate thoroughly, to discriminate clearly between assumption and proven knowledge. He should be a man of faith, one who perceives both difficulties and ways to surmount them. He should not only know mathematics and mechanics, but should be trained to methods of thought based on these fundamental branches of learning. Organized habits of memory and large capacity for information are necessary. He should have extensive knowledge of the sciences and other branches of learning and know intensively those things which concern his specialties. He must be a student throughout his career and keep abreast of human progress.
Having been endowed more or less completely with qualifica tions and capacities requisite for a professional engineer and having developed them with the aid of educational and other institutions and contacts provided by civilized communities, the engineer is under obligation to consider the sociological, economic and spiritual effects of engineering operations and to aid his fellowmen to adjust wisely their modes of living, their industrial, commercial and governmental procedures, and their educational processes so as to enjoy the greatest possible benefit from the progress achieved through our accumulating knowledge of the universe and ourselves as applied by engineering. The engineer's principal work is to discover and conserve natural resources of materials and forces, including the human, and to create means for utilizing these resources with minimal cost and waste and with maximal useful results. (See CIVIL ENGINEER ; ELECTRICAL ENGINEER ; MECHANICAL ENGINEER; MINING ENGINEER; and CHEMICAL ENGINEERING.) (A. D. F.)