12 HENRY A. ROWLAND 



page of that letter, on another of which he says, " It is simply horrible; 

 I can never get on here." It was not that he could not learn Latin and 

 Greek if he was so minded, but that he had long ago become wholly 

 absorbed in the love of nature and in the study of nature's laws, and 

 the whole situation was to his ambitious spirit most artificial and irk- 

 some. Time did not soften his feelings or lessen his desire to escape 

 from such uncongenial surroundings, and, at his own request, Dr. Far- 

 rand, Principal of the Academy at Newark, New Jersey, to which city 

 the family had recently removed, was consulted as to what ought to- 

 be done. Fortunately for everybody, his advice was that the boy ought 

 to be allowed to follow his bent, and, at his own suggestion, he was 

 sent, in the autumn of that year, to the Eensselaer 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 joyfully welcomed by 

 young 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 seventeen years 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 well 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, however complicated 

 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 -sun ken canal boat by pumping the water out of it. He described 

 engine?, 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 ten feet above the water so that they had to overcome a 



