The sittings of the International Engineering Congress, the largest gathering
of the kind ever held in the United Kingdom, opened on Tuesday in Glasgow. Mr. Mansergh, the presi- dent, laid especial stress on the dependence of engineering on its cheapness, and admitted that only too good a case could be made out for the allegation that a mistaken statutory system had discouraged in this country — for the time at least— the naturalisation and development of electrical engineering on the largest scale,—a point further elaborated by Mr. Langdon in his address to the electrical section. In this department of engineering England had become stationary if not retrograde, and if we were to retain our rank as a nation we must ascertain and re- move the cause of our present indebtedness to a foreign source to meet a great portion of our wants. We may also note Sir Guildford Molesworth's interesting paper in the railway section on the peculiar difficulties encountered in the construc- tion of the Uganda line, the account given by the German delegate of the great canal lifts on the Dortmund and Ems Canal, Mr. Livesey's appeal to the gas engineers as best able to solve the pressing problem of smokeless towns, and Sir Nathaniel Barnaby's interesting survey of naval architecture in the nineteenth century, with , special reference to the differeutiation and approximation in the types of ships for commerce and war.
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