xxvi OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



The infinite variety of careers for which variety of native 

 powers and accidental advantages and opportunity open before us 

 commonly involves at the beginning of active life a period of effort 

 which is more or less tentative. Gibbs was no exception to this 

 rule, but the period of tentative effort was brief, including, perhaps, 

 only the first half dozen of his scientific papers. It is worthy of 

 note that these show a somewhat wide range of interest and 

 capacity. 



His first scientific paper, published while in the junior class of 

 Columbia College, was entitled " Description of a New Form of 

 Magneto-Electric Machine, and an Account of a Carbon Battery of 

 Considerable Energy." While a student in the medical college, he 

 published a discussion of the theory of compund salt radicals. 

 While a student in Germany, he published several mineral analyses. 

 Just before becoming professor of chemistry in the New York City 

 Free Academy, he showed that color changes produced by heat are 

 in the direction of the less refrangible end of the spectrum. In 



1852, he published the first of his papers on analytical methods. In 



1853, he prepared an arsenical derivative of valeric acid. None of 

 this work was of commanding importance, but it was of good 

 quality, and it well illustrates Gibbs's knowledge of, and power of 

 interesting himself in, somewhat widely varied departments of his 

 chosen science. 



The work to be mentioned next was worthy of the powers of 

 any chemist in the world, and gave to him an established reputation 

 and an honorable place among the leaders of chemistry. During 

 the years to which allusion has just been made, he had been at work 

 on a new cobaltamine, and, in 1856, he published a great research 

 which commanded general recognition of the abilities of a master. 

 A salt of the first known of the cobaltamines had been prepared by 

 Gmelin in the year in which Gibbs was born, but it was some time 

 before its true nature was understood. In 1847, Genth, then a 

 student in Germany, prepared other related compounds and was the 

 first rightly to understand their composition. Two French chemists 

 working independently came to conclusions like those of Genth; he 

 had established the composition of the two cobaltamines now called 



