WP NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
Science,” was to be awarded by the trustees of Columbia College 
upon the nomination of the Academy. At the meeting of 
November, 1891, the Academy voted to accept the obligation to 
make nominations and appointed a committee to take charge of 
the matter. The first nomination was made at the annual meeting 
of the Academy in April, 1895, at which time the committee 
reported, in part, as follows: 
“* Acting upon all the suggestions received from members of the Academy and 
such other information as the members of the committee could secure, and acting 
in strict conformity to the specific conditions of the bequest, the committee here- 
with unanimously presents the name of Lord Rayleigh for the first award of the 
Barnard medal for his brilliant discovery of argon, which illustrates so com- 
pletely the value of exact scientific methods in the investigation of the physical 
properties of matter.” °° 
The Academy was again, in 1892, made the trustee of a fund 
for the encouragement of chemical research. This fund was one 
presented to Wolcott Gibbs, an incorporator of the Academy, 
by his friends, upon the occasion of his attaining the age of 
seventy years. Professor Gibbs expressed his appreciation of 
this token of regard and his desire to place it in the hands of 
the Academy for the promotion of science, in an affecting letter 
from which the following sentences are extracted: “° 
“Vy DEAR PROFESSORS JACKSON AND LOEB: May I beg you to present to 
those from whom I received, a few days since, so signal a mark of friendship and 
good-will my heartiest, most earnest, and most grateful acknowledgment? ‘The 
address which I received on my seventieth birthday, signed by more than one hun- 
dred friends, pupils, and assistants, brings back my youth in recalling the names of 
those who now join to offer me more than mere good wishes to cheer my advanc- 
ing age. ‘Their active friendship has taken the form which was most acceptable 
to me—that of an endowment to assist research in my own branch of science; so 
that I can feel that in a certain sense my power to work will not terminate with 
my life. As the generosity of my friends permits me also to dispose of the manner 
in which the endowment shall be administered, I submit to them, through 
you, the plan which seems to me best adapted to carry out their wishes—a plan 
which has been fully tested in somewhat similar cases and found to work well 
in practice. 
© Rep. Nat. Acad. Sci. for 1895, pp. 29, 30. 
“The letter is given in full in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., vol. 1, pp. 365, 366. The amount 
of the fund was $2,600. Professor Gibbs was subsequently President of the Academy. 
