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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 362. 



stimulating effect of his own enthusiasm, 

 and while there was only here and there 

 one possessed of the divine afflatus of true 

 genius, there were many ready to labor 

 most assiduously in fostering the growth, 

 development and final fruition of germs 

 which genius stopped only to plant. A 

 proper estimate of the magnitude and extent 

 of Eowland's work would require, there- 

 fore, a careful examination, analytical and 

 historical, of the entire mass of contribu- 

 tions to physical science during the past 

 twenty-five years, many of his own being 

 fundamental in character and far-reaching 

 in their influence upon the trend of thought, 

 in theory and in practice. But it was 

 quality, not quantity, that he himself 

 most esteemed in any performance ; it was 

 quality that always commanded his admira- 

 tion 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. 



Eowland's first contribution to the litera- 

 ture 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 surprise, 

 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 edi- 

 tor, for by the admission of certain typo- 

 graphical errors he practically destroj^ed 

 both. The embryo physicist got nothing 

 but a little quiet amusement out of this, but 

 in a letter of that day he declares his inten- 

 tion of some time writing a sensible article 

 for the journal that so unexpectedly printed 

 what he meant to be otherwise. This reso- 

 lution 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 per- 

 petual 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 complimen- 

 tary notice in other journals. This was in 

 1871, the year following that in which he 

 was graduated as a civil engineer from the 

 Eensselaer 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, * Illustrations of Resonances and 

 Actions of a Similar Nature,' in which he 

 described and discussed various examples 

 of resonance or * sympathetic ' vibration. 

 This paper, in a way, marks his admission 

 to the ranks of professional students of 

 science and may be properly considered 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 Sci- 

 ence printed a brief note by Rowland on the 

 spectrum of the Aurora, sent in response to 

 a kindly and always appreciated letter from 

 Professor George F. Barker, one of the ed- 

 itors of that journal. It is interesting as 

 marking the beginning of his optical work. 

 For a year, or perhaps for several years, 

 previous to this time, however, he had been 

 busily engaged on what proved to be, in its 

 influence upon his future career, the most 

 important work of his life. To climb the 

 ladder of reputation and success by simple, 

 easy steps might have contented Rowland, 

 but it would have been quite out of har- 



