COMMEMORATION OF PROF. HENRY A. ROWLAND. 749 



wholly al)sorbed in the lov(^ of nature and in th<^ study of nature's 

 law.s, and the whole situation was to his anil)itious spirit most artificial 

 and irksome. Time did not soften his feelings or lessen Ins desire to 

 escape from such uncongenial surroundings, and. at his own request, 

 Dv. Farrand, principal of the Academy at Newark, New .Jersey, to 

 which city the family had recently moved, was consulted as to what 

 ought to be done. Fortunately for ever3'body, his advice was that the 

 bo}' ought to be allowed to follow his bent, and, at his own suggestion, 

 he was sent, in the autumn of that year, to the Rensselaer Polytechnic 

 Institute at Troy, where he remained five years, and from which he 

 was graduated as a civil engineer in 1870. 



It is unnecessary to say that this change was joyfull}^ welcomed by 

 3'oung Rowland. At Andover the only opportunity that had offered 

 for the exercise of his skill as a mechanic was in the construction of a 

 somewhat complicated device by means of which he outwitted some of 

 his schoolmates in an early attempt to haze him, and in this he took no 

 little pride. At Troy he gave loose rein to his ardent desires, and his 

 career in science may almost be said to begin with his entrance upon 

 his work there and before he was 17 year.; old. 



He made immediate use of the opportunities afforded in Troy and its 

 neighborhood for the examination of machinery and manufacturing 

 processes, and one of his earliest letters to his friends contained a clear 

 and detailed description of the operation of making railroad iron, the 

 rolls, shears, saws, and other special machines being represented in 

 uncommonly Avell-executed pen drawings. One can easily see in this 

 letter a full confirmation of a statement that he occasionally made 

 later in life, namely, that he had never seen a machine, how^ever com- 

 plicated it might be, whose working he could not at once comprehend. 

 In another letter, written within a few weeks of his arrival in Troy, 

 he shows in a remarkable way his power of going to the root of things, 

 which even at that early age was sufficiently in evidence to mark him 

 for future distinction as a natural philosopher. On the river he saw 

 two boats, equipped with steam pumps, engaged in trying to raise a 

 half-sunken canal boat by pumping the water out of it. He described 

 engines, pumps, etc., in much detail, and adds, "But there was one 

 thing that I did not like about it; they had the end of their discharge 

 pipe about 10 feet above the water, so that they had to overcome a 

 pressure of about 5 pounds to the square inch to raise the water so 

 high, and yet they let it go after they got it there, whereas if they 

 had attached a pipe to the end of the discharge pipe and let it hang 

 down into the water, the pressure of water on that pipe would just 

 have balanced the .5 pounds to the square inch in the other, so that they 

 could have used larger pumps with the same engines and thus have 

 got more water out in a given time." 



The facilities for learning physics, in his day, at the Rensselaer Poly- 



