Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/292

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286
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the same time was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences. For thirty-eight years he held the professorship of physics while Columbia developed from a small college into a great university, his own work adding much to its fame. His researches in experimental physics are too numerous even for naming, extending as they do over a large part of the science. They include work on photography, projectiles, vacuum pumps, electricity and especially physiological optics. Every one of his papers, perhaps seventy-five in number, embodied a new idea, worked out with ingenuity and persistence. He was also an artist, his water-color sketches being highly esteemed, and was perhaps especially interested in those phases of research that required the knowledge of the physicist, the psychologist and the painter.

Rood was one of the marked men of Columbia University and of New York City. Striking in appearance and in manners, possessing and possibly affecting certain peculiarities, working behind locked doors, sometimes living with his family and sometimes not, in part a recluse, though not averse to congenial company or an evening at the Century Club, he possessed altogether a notable personality. He was a good enemy and a good friend; and the present writer regards it as a special privilege that he was counted a friend.

The Naples Station.

THE PROPOSED ENLARGEMENT OF THE NAPLES STATION.

The untiring energy of the founder of the Naples Station, Professor Anton Dohrn, has made it possible, with the help of generous friends, to add a new building to the two already existing ones. When first started, in 1873, the station consisted of a single building the middle one of the three in the accompanying figure. It soon became necessary to add another part, and the building to the left in the figure was tend erected. The station has now outgrown both of these, and another building is about to be added. As shown in the figure the new part will be a duplicate of the oldest building as far as the exterior is concerned. In the interior, however, the arrangement will be entirely different. It is proposed to have a large laboratory on the first floor devoted to physiological research; another on the floor above to physiological chemistry. In addition there will be a large number of private rooms for zoologists and physiologists. A new feature will be rooms in which the