A similar movement was taking place in the United States in those days. Among its leaders were President Barnard of Columbia College, and Joseph Henry, the first and the most distinguished secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The date of the foundation of Johns Hopkins University falls within the early period of this movement. Niven told me that what Maxwell had been doing in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge was being done also by Maxwell’s friend, Professor Rowland, at Johns Hopkins, founded in Baltimore in 1876. Maxwell thought very highly of his young American friend, and undoubtedly recommended him strongly for the physics professorship at Johns Hopkins. Just as the establishment of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory in Cambridge marks the beginning of a great epoch in the development of physics in Cambridge and in Great Britain, so the organization of the physics laboratory at Johns Hopkins by Rowland marks a new and most fruitful era of scientific research in the United States. Rowland’s influence had not yet been felt at Columbia College when I was a student there, nor at many other American colleges of those days. But the forward movement soon commenced; and the people of this country do not understand yet as fully as they should how much they owe to the late Henry Augustus Rowland, whom I had the honor of knowing personally and whose friendship I enjoyed for several years. One of the aims of this simple narrative is to throw more light upon some obscure spots of this kind which need more illumination, and particularly upon the work of men like “Rowland of Troy, the doughty knight,” as Maxwell referred to him in his verses.