“Fully forty per cent of Idaho is permanent forest land, you know,” said the Dean, “and the forestry problems of the state are of great importance. Our interest is divided between working on these and preparing young men for the forest service and the lumber industry. We are drawing students from all over the country but we can’t train them and turn them out fast enough.”
In the School of Mines nearby Father learned a similar lesson of the importance of the work to the state and a demand for competent graduates all out of proportion to the numbers the school was able to supply.
“Our teaching falls into three main divisions,” he was told: “geology, to make the students familiar with the nature and occurrence of ores and minerals; mining engineering, concerned with the extraction of these ores from the earth; and metallurgy, in which we study the methods employed in making valuable metal from crude ore.”
We Can’t Train Them Fast Enough
Father and son both were so fascinated by the possibilities of these laboratories that practically every piece of apparatus had to be set going for them before they were content to leave.
“If we could all have the benefit of this kind of training,” Father remarked somewhat sadly, “we wouldn’t all be such fools over mining stocks.”
The professor only smiled.
Back across the campus they went to the College of Engineering. The Boy had been dabbling in electricity and mechanics all through his high-school course and was soon absorbed in a discussion of wireless telephones with the professor in charge. Father walked rather gingerly among the whirring belts and singing dynamos, but felt more at home in the wood and metal working shops nearby. The values of the course in Chemical Engineering were explained to him at some length, but Civil Engineering he knew all about.
