Berlin, and carried out a well-known research on the effect of an electrically charged body in motion, showing it to give, rise to a magnetic field. As soon as he was settled at Baltimore, two important pieces of work engaged his attention. One was a re determination of the ohm. For this he obtained a value which was substantially different from that ascertained by the committee of the British Association appointed for the purpose, but ultimately he had the satisfaction of seeing his own result accepted as the more correct of the two. The other was a new determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat. In this he used Joule’s paddle-wheel method, though with many improvements, the whole apparatus being on a larger scale and the experiments being conducted over a wider range of temperature. He obtained a result distinctly higher than Joule’s final figure; and in addition he made many valuable observations on thermometrical questions and on the variation of the specific heat of water, which J. P. Joule had assumed to be the same at all temperatures. In 1882, before the Physical Society of London, he gave a description of the diffraction gratings with which his name is specially associated, and which have been of enormous advantage to astronomical spectroscopy. These gratings consist of pieces of metal or glass ruled by means of a diamond point with a very large number of parallel lines, on the extreme accuracy of which their efficiency depends. For their production, therefore, dividing engines of extraordinary trueness and delicacy must be employed, and in the construction of such machines Rowland’s engineering skill brought him conspicuous success. The results of his labours may be found in the elaborate Photographic Map of the Normal Solar Spectrum (1888) and the Table of Solar Wave-Lengths (1898). In the later years of his life he was engaged in developing a system of multiplex telegraphy.
ROWLANDS, RICHARD (fl. 1560–1620), Anglo-Dutch
antiquary, whose real name was Verstegen, was the son of a
cooper whose father, Theodore Roland Verstegen, a Dutch
emigrant, came to England about 1500. Under the name
of Rowlands, Richard went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1565,
where he studied early English history and the Anglo-Saxon
language. Leaving the university without a degree, he published
in 1576 a work of antiquarian research, translated from
the German, entitled The Post of the World, describing the great
cities of Europe; and soon afterwards he moved to Antwerp,
where he resumed the name of Verstegen, and set up in business
as a printer and engraver. In 1587 he went to Paris, and in
1595 to Spain, where he studied in the college at Seville, afterwards
returning to Antwerp, where he lived so far as is known
until his death, the date of which, though certainly later than
1620, is unknown. Rowlands was a zealous Roman Catholic,
and in 1587 he published at Antwerp Theatrum Crudelitatum
haereticorum, in which he criticized the treatment of the Roman
Catholics in England under Elizabeth so freely that when a
French translation of the book appeared in the following year
he was thrown into prison at the instance of the English ambassador
in Paris. Many of his writings were published in the
name of Verstegen. His works included A Dialogue on Dying
Well (1603), a translation from the Italian; Restitution of
Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the English
Nation, dedicated to James I. (1605); Neder Dvytsche
Epigramen (1617); Sundry Successive Regal Governments
in England (1620); Spiegel der Nederlandsche Elenden (1621).
The verses on the defeat of the Irish rebels under Tyrone,
entitled England’s Joy, by R. R. (1601), is doubtfully attributed
to him. Richard Verstegan, author of Nederlantische
Antiquiteyten (Brussels, 1646), is probably another person,
possibly Rowlands’s son.
See Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, edited by P. Bliss (4 vols., London, 1813–20); J. W. Burgon, Life and Times of Sir T. Gresham (2 vols., London, 1839); W. C. Hazlitt, Collections and Notes (London, 1882 and 1887).
ROWLANDS, SAMUEL (c. 1573–1630), English author of pamphlets in prose and verse, which reflect the follies and humours of the lower middle-class life of his time, seems to have had no contemporary literary reputation; but his work throws considerable light on the social London of his day. Among his works, which include some poems on sacred subjects, are: The Betraying of Christ (1598); The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-vaine (epigrams and satires) and A Mery Meetinge, or ’tis Mery when Knaves mete (1600)—the two latter being publicly burnt by order, but republished later under other names—(Humors Ordinarie and The Knave of Clubbes); Greenes Ghost haunting Conie-Catchers (1602), which he pretended to have edited from Greene’s papers, but which is largely borrowed from his printed works; Tis Merrie when Gossips meete (1602), a dialogue between a Widow, a Wife, a Maid and a Vintner; Looke to it; for Ile stabbe ye (1604), in which Death describes the tyrants, careless divines and other evil-doers whom he will destroy; Hells broke loose (1605), an account of John of Leyden, and in the same year a Theatre of Divine Recreation (not extant), poems founded on the Old Testament; A Terrible Battell betwene . . . Time and Death (1606); Democritus, or Doctor Merry-man his Medicines against Melancholy humors, reprinted, with alterations, as Doctor Merrie-man, and Diogenes Lanthorne (1607), in which “ Athens ” is London; The Famous History of Guy, Earl of Warwick (1607), a long romance in Rowland’s favourite six-lined stanza, and one of his hastiest, least successful efforts; Humors Looking Glasse (1608); and Martin Mark-all, Beadle of Bridewell (1610), a history of roguery containing much information about notable highwaymen and the completest vocabulary of thieves’ slang up to that time. Of his later works may be mentioned Sir Thomas Overbury; or the Poysoned Knights Complaint, and The Melancholie Knight (1615), which suggests a hearing of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle. The last of his humorous studies, Good Newes and Bad Newes, appeared in 1622, and in 1628 he published a pious volume of prose and verse, entitled Heavens Glory, Seeke it: Earts vanitie, Flye it: Hells Horror, Fere it. After this nothing is known of him. Mr Gosse, in his introduction to Rowlands’s complete works, edited (1872–80) for the Hunterian Club in Glasgow by Mr S. J. H. Herrtage, sums him up as a “kind of small non-political Defoe, a pamphleteer in verse whose talents were never put into exercise except when their possessor was pressed for means, and a poet of considerable talent without one spark or glimmer of genius.”
Mr Gosse’s notice is reprinted in his Seventeenth Century Studies (1883). A recently discovered poem by Rowlands, The Bride (1617), was reprinted at Boston, U.S.A., in 1905 by Mr A. C. Potter.
ROWLANDSON, THOMAS (1756–1827), English caricaturist, was born in Old Jewry, London, in July 1756, the son of a tradesman or city merchant. On leaving school he became a student in the Royal Academy. At the age of sixteen he resided and studied for a time in Paris, and he afterwards made frequent tours on the Continent, enriching his portfolios with numerous jottings of life and character. In 1775 he exhibited at the Royal Academy a drawing of “Delilah visiting Samson in Prison,” and in the following years he was represented by various portraits and landscapes. Possessed of much facility of execution and a ready command of the figure, he was spoken of as a promising student; and had he continued his early application he would have made his mark as a painter. But by the death of his aunt, a French lady, he fell heir to a sum of £7000, plunged into the dissipations of the town and was known to sit at the gaming-table for thirty-six hours at a stretch. In time poverty overtook him; and the friendship and example of Gillray and Bunbury seem to have suggested caricature as a means of filling an empty purse. His drawing of Vauxhall, shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1784, had been engraved by Pollard, and the print was a success. Rowlandson was largely employed by Rudolph Ackermann, the art publisher, who in 1809–11 issued in his Poetical Magazine “The Schoolmaster’s Tour”—a series of plates with illustrative verses by Dr William Coombe. They were the most popular of the artist's works. Again engraved by Rowlandson himself in 1812, and issued under the title of the “Tour of Dr Syntax
