2 HENRY A. ROWLAND 



quality, not quantity, that he himself most esteemed in any perform- 

 ance; 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 quantity we prefer to judge his work to-day, 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 seventeen years old. Much to his sur- 

 prise 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 typographical errors he 

 practically destroyed both. The embryo physicist got nothing but a 

 little quiet amusement out of this, but in a letter of that day he de- 

 clares 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 Conservation of Energy which Rowland had already grasped. 

 It was, as might be expected, thoroughly well done, and received not a 

 little complimentary notice in other journals. This was in 1871, the 

 year 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 preliminary 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 " Illustra- 

 tions of Resonances and Actions of a Similar Nature," in which he 

 described and discussed various examples of resonance or " sympa- 

 thetic " vibration. This paper, in a way, marks his admission to the 

 ranks of professional students of science and may be properly con- 

 sidered as his first formal contribution to scientific literature; his last 

 was an exhaustive article on spectroscopy, a subject of which he, above 

 all others, was master, prepared for a new edition of the Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica, not yet published. Early in 1873 the American Journal of 

 Science printed a brief note by Rowland on the spectrum of the Aurora, 

 sent in response to a kindly and always appreciated letter from Pro- 



