OLIVER WOLCOTT GIBBS. xxi 



inherited from the remarkable Connecticut family from which she 

 was descended, furnished the lad with the guidance and the home 

 influences suitable for his healthy development. At the age of 

 twelve years, he returned to New York and prepared for college. 

 In three years, he entered the freshman class of Columbia College, 

 and was graduated in 1841, at the age of nineteen years. In the 

 year before his graduation, he published the description of a new 

 form of galvanic battery, in which carbon was used for the inactive 

 plate ; the young undergraduate publishing the discovery in the same 

 year as Cooper and Schoenbein. The impulse towards such studies 

 is to be found in the early life on his father's estate and in a 

 father's example and other influence ; but from the teaching of 

 Renwick, then professor of physics and chemistry at Columbia 

 College, a student like young Gibbs doubtless obtained much which 

 was of value. 



In the class of 1841, in which Wolcott Gibbs was graduated, there 

 were at some time forty-nine men, of whom thirty-one took their 

 bachelor's degree. Among these thirty-one, the most distinguished, 

 after Wolcott Gibbs were : Duffield, senator for the Third Senatorial 

 District of INHchigan, brigadier general, United States Volunteers, 

 1 863-1 864, and superintendent of the United States Coast and 

 Geodetic Survey, 1894-1898; and Emott, mayor of Poughkeepsie, 

 justice of the Superior Court of New York, 1855-1863, and the 

 judge of the Court of Appeals till his death in 1884. Among those 

 who did not take the final degree was William H. Vanderbilt, who 

 died in 1885. 



After graduation, Wolcott Gibbs served for some months as 

 assistant to Robert Hare, the inventor of the compound blowpipe, 

 who was professor of chemistry in the IVIedical School of the Uni- 

 versity of Pennsylvania. After obtaining here an experience cer- 

 tain to be useful in fitting him for such a professorship, he entered 

 the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, and received 

 the degree of doctor of medicine in 1845. There is not much 

 reason to suppose that Gibbs ever expected to practice medicine, 

 for his next step shows that the study of chemistry had become the 

 main purpose of his life. He went to Germany to secure such in- 



