The industrial resources of Ireland / By Robert Kane.

  • Robert John Kane
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The industrial resources of Ireland / By Robert Kane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    441/492 (page 419)
    a OF IRELAND. 419 stances upon which he operates, and the laws of action to which they are subjected. To give an industrial education, therefore, it is necessary to unite the two elements—science and practice. Science should be taught especially with a view to the application of its prin- ciples. Practice should be followed with constant reference to the principles upon which it rests. Im this way, the elements of the highest industrial progress should be obtained. The economy of any process, the effective duty of any machine, the real value of any material, would be tested by the application of direct calculation to the results produced. The manufac- turer never could be taken by surprise, for the different ope- rations of his works would all be conducted under a system of numerical control, which should render it impossible that any- thing important could escape his observation. The practice of the arts is that which is most difficult to be learned, and that in which we labour under the greatest disad- vantage. In England, every manufacturing town is a great school of practical education, where each branch of mechanical and chemical industry is carried on, on a vast seale, and by a variety of processes. Her workmen, thus educated, though otherwise illiterate, pass into other countries, and are thus serving, most efficiently, to develope throughout Europe the different branches of native industry. Amongst us, such schools of industrial education, are, as yet, scarcely existant. For the acquisition of this practical knowledge, we must look therefore to Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. These are the uni- versities, in which the persons desirous of developing the in- dustrial resources of Ireland must graduate. The English workmen, although perfect in thus carrying out the processes to which long experience has conducted them, are destitute, owing to the low state of general education in that country, of the power of applying the aids of science to their modification, or further improvement. The processes adapted to the nature of materials in certain districts of England, are inapplicable in others, and still more in other countries, and it is on this ac- count that so many schemes for utilizing our sources of indus- try have failed totally inthe hands of the English workmen 2E 2