15 



which more than all else insured the success of the new enterprise. 

 A few words about Eowland from Professor Michie, of the Military 

 Academy, led to his being called to West Point by telegraph, and on 

 the banks of the Hudson these two walked and talked, " he telling me," 

 Dr. Oilman has said, " his dreams for science and I telling him my 

 dreams for higher education/' Eowland, with characteristic frank- 

 ness, writes of this interview, " Professor Gilman was very much 

 pleased with me," which, indeed, was the simple truth. The engage- 

 ment was quickly made. Eowland was sent to Europe to study labor- 

 atories and purchase apparatus, and the rest is history, already told and 

 everywhere known. 



Eowland's personality was in many respects remarkable. Tall, erect 

 and lithe in figure, fond of athletic sports, there was upon his face a 

 certain look of severity which was, in a way, an index of the exacting 

 standard he set for himself and others. It did not conceal, however, 

 what was, after all, his most striking characteristic, namely, a perfectly 

 frank, open and simple straightforwardness in thought, in speech and 

 in action. His love of truth held him in supreme control, and, like 

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

 otherwise than as they 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 separation, 

 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 some- 

 times impressed strangers unpleasantly, but which, to his friends, was 

 one of his most charming qualities. Much of his success as an investi- 

 gator 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 Science in the early days 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 



