Download or read book Transactions of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, Vol. 44 written by and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2017-12-03 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Transactions of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, Vol. 44: Incorporated Gentlemen, in making this rapid and superficial survey, I have digressed from the line I set before myself in this address, and I have done so in order to meet an objection we sometimes have made to us when we ask a member for a paper - the objection that he has nothing to say. You have all something useful to say, drawn from personal experience in the ever-changing conditions of daily practice, and I should like to repeat what has been urged by some of my predecessors, that a lengthy or exhaustive paper is not always necessary; a short one will often lead to an interesting and instructive discussion. The function of discussion in the elucidation of scientific truth is not perhaps fully appreciated. I am inclined to think that its value is largely overlaid and concealed in the usurpation of its province by technical and scientific journals with their anony mously authoritative treatment of every conceivable subject in such abundance that, the appetite, jaded and atrophied by a perpetual satiety, loses all zest. We are constantly in the throes of a laboured digestion of incongruous and inchoate material. The correction lies in a return to the simpler and more direct methods of verbal discussion, in which each disputant presents the results of his own study and experience, and tests the accuracy and completeness of his observation, and the fairness of his deductions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.