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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: the insignificance of much engineering literature. So far as
the science can be reduced to formulas or diagrams, the book
is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate study
of the ways of nature, the author's words will too often be
found vapid. This fact - that engineering looks one way, and
literature another - was what my grand-father overlooked. All
his life long, his pen was in his hand, piling up a treasury
of knowledge, preparing himself against all possible
contingencies. Scarce anything fell under his notice but he
perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled it
in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes
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