Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/629

Rh influence, having appeared in manj editions and having been translated into a dozen different languages. Finally he devoted ten years of his life to a history of the American civil war.

Draper's early scientific work was concerned with the chemical action of light. In 1837 he investigated the growth of plants exposed to the light of the solar spectrum. He at that time also studied the action of light in changing the color of metallic salts and applied the photographic process to the solution of physical problems. When Daguerre 's discovery was announced he improved the process and took in 1840 the first portrait of the human face, at a time when this was regarded as impossible in Europe. In the same year he took the first photograph of the surface of the moon. Draper was also the first to obtain photographs of the diffraction spectrum, and of the ultra-red and ultraviolet lines. In 1857 he wrote that the occurrence of lines in the spectrum is connected with the chemical nature of the substance and that "if we are ever able to acquire certain knowledge respecting the physical state of the sun and other stars, it will be by an examination of the light they emit." It is an interestitnginteresting [sic] fact that his son, Henry Draper, in 1872, was the first to obtain photographs of the fixed lines in the spectra of stars.

Draper's work in physiology was of importance; he made many new discoveries and consistently used physicochemical explanation in the place of the vitalism of those days. In like manner he applied causal principles to the evolution of society. Draper played an important part in the development of modern science at a time when America was represented by but few leaders.

was a member of one of those families which in Boston and in Philadelphia have maintained the traditions of the English aristocracy. His grandfather was the eminent mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch, and his father and his brothers have like himself always been ready in the performance of public service. Bowditch was born in Boston in 1840; on graduating from Harvard College in 1861 he volunteered for service in the civil war, and at its close retired as major of the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry. He then passed through the Lawrence Scientific School and the Harvard Medical School and spent three years abroad working under Carl Ludwig at Leipzig. When he returned to Boston in 1871 the chair of anatomy and physiology held by Oliver Wendell Holmes was divided, physiology being assigned to Bowditch. For thirty-five years he was a leader in education and research in the medical sciences, and the physiological laboratory that he founded was the pioneer of laboratories in the medical sciences. He was largely responsible for the medical school building, completed in 1883, the laboratories of which were admirably equipped for that time, and again was largely responsible for the magnificent buildings and laboratories of the new medical school opened in 1906, the year in which, owing to failing health, he became professor emeritus. As dean of the medical school and in other ways he exercised an enormous influence on the improvement of medical education and medical science in this country. His own researches on the growth of children, on vision, on the knee jerk and on other subjects were of great importance, but in a brief biographical notice, it seems more fitting to dwell on his great public services for physiology, for medical education, for the city and for the country. Of his personality Professor Charles S. Minot, a student under him and for many years his colleague, says: "He found great happiness in his home life, in his children and grandchildren, and also in the numerous friends, whom he attached not only by his unusual abilities