740 COMMEMORATION OF PROF. HENRY A. ROWLAND. 



of the entire mass of contributions to physical science during the past 

 twenty-five years, many of his own being fundamental in character and 

 far-reaching in their influence upon the trend of thought, in theory 

 and in practice. But it was quality, not quantity, that he himself most 

 esteemed in any performance; it was quality that always commanded 

 his admiration or excited him to keenest criticism. No one recognized 

 more quickly than he a real gem, however minute or fragmentary it 

 might be, and by quality rather than by quantit}^ we prefer to judge 

 his work to-da}', as he would himself have chosen. 



Rowland's first contribution to the literature of science took the form 

 of a letter to The Scientific American, written in the early autumn of 

 1865, when he was not yet 17 years old. Much to his surprise this 

 letter was printed, for he says of it, "I wrote it as a kind of joke and 

 did not expect them to publish it." Neither its humor nor its sense, 

 in which it was not lacking, seems to have been appreciated by the 

 editor, for by the admission of certain tj^pographical errors he practi- 

 cally destroyed both. The embryo phj'sicist got nothing but a little 

 quiet amusement out of this, but in a letter of that day he declares his 

 intention of some time writing a sensible article for the journal that so 

 unexpectedly printed what he meant to be otherwise. This resolution 

 he seems not to have forgotten, for nearly six years later there appeared 

 in its columns what was, as far as is known, his second printed paper 

 and his first serious public discussion of a scientific question. It was 

 a keen criticism of an invention which necessarily involved the idea of 

 perpetual motion, in direct conflict with the great law of the conserva- 

 tion of energy which Rowland had alread}^ grasped. It was, as might 

 be expected, thoroughly well done, and received not a little compli- 

 mentar}^ notice in other journals. This was in 1871, the j^ear following 

 that in which he was graduated as a civil engineer from the Rensselaer 

 Polytechnic Institute, and the article was written while in the field at 

 work on a preliminar}' railroad survey. A year later, having returned 

 to the institute as instructor in physics, he published in the Journal of 

 the Franklin Institute an article entitled "Illustrations of resonances 

 and actions of a similar nature," in which he described and discussed 

 various examples of resonance or "sympathetic" vibration. This 

 paper, in a way, marks his admission to the ranks of professional stu- 

 dents of science, and maj'^ be properly considered as his first formal 

 contri])ution to scientific literature. His last was an exhaustive article 

 on spectroscopy, a subject of Avhich he, above all others, was master, 

 prepared for a new edition of the Encyclopsedia Britannica, not yet 

 published. Early in 1873 the American Journal of Science printed a 

 brief note l)y Rowland on the spectrum of the Aurora, sent in response 

 to a kindly and alwiays appreciated letter from Prof. George F. Barker, 

 one of the editors of that journal. It is interesting as marking the 

 beginning of his optical work. For a year, or perhaps for several 



