752 COMMEMORATION OF PROF. HENRY A. ROWLAND. 



and, like Galileo, he had no patience with those who try to make things 

 appear otherwise than as the}" actually are. His criticisms of the 

 work of others were keen and merciless, and sometimes there remained 

 a sting of which he himself had not the slightest suspicion. " I would 

 not have done it for the world," he once said to me after being told 

 that his pitiless criticism of a scientific paper had wounded the feelings 

 of its author. As a matter of fact, he was warm-hearted and generous, 

 and his occasionally seeming otherwise was due to the complete separa- 

 tion, in his own mind, of the product and the personality of the author. 

 He possessed that rare power, habit in his case, of seeing himself, not 

 as others see him, but as he saw others. He looked at himself and 

 his own work exactly as if he had been another person, and this gave 

 rise to a frankness of expression regarding his own performance 

 which sometimes impressed strangers unpleasantly, but which, to his 

 friends, was one of his most charming qualities. Much of his success 

 as an investigator was due to a firm confidence in his own powers, and 

 in the unerring course of the logic of science which inspired him to 

 cling tenaciously to an idea when once he had given it a place in his 

 mind. At a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in the 

 early da}\s of our knowledge of electric generators he read a paper 

 relating to the fundamental principles of the dynamo. A gentleman 

 who had had large experience with the practical working of dynamos 

 listened to the paper, and at the end said to the academy that unfor- 

 tunately practice directly contradicted Professor Rowland's theory, to 

 which instantly replied Rowland, "■ So much the worse for the prac- 

 tice," which, indeed, turned out to be the case. 



Like all men of real genius, he had phenomenal capacity for con- 

 centration of thought and effort. Of this, one w T ho was long and 

 intimately associated with him remarks, " 1 can remember cases when 

 he appeared as if drugged from mere inability to recall his mind from 

 the pursuit of all-absorbing problems, and he had a triumphant joy in 

 intellectual achievement such as we would look for in other men only 

 from the gratification of an elemental passion." So completely con- 

 sumed was he by fires of his own kindling that he often failed to give 

 due attention to the work of others, and some of his public utterances 

 give evidence of this curious neglect of the historic side of his subject. 



As a teacher his position was quite unique. Unfit for the ordinary 

 routine work of the class room, he taught, as more men ought to teach, 

 by example rather than by precept. Says one of his most eminent 

 pupils, Li Even of the more advanced students only those who were 

 able to brook severe and searching criticism reaped the full benefit 

 of being under him, but he contributed that which, in a universit} 7 , 

 is above all teaching of routine— the spectacle of scientific work 

 thoroughly done and the example of a lofty ideal." 



Returning home about twenty years ago, after an expatriation of 



