XXX OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



It has been indicated that Gibbs had a wide range of insight and 

 interest. He did no considerable work in organic chemistry, but he 

 did not entirely neglect it. Lecturing as he did upon heat and light, 

 and writing as he did for twenty-three years the abstracts of 

 physical researches which appeared in the American Journal of 

 Science, he had a knowledge of and an interest in, physical subjects 

 which was expressed in several papers on optical matters. Serious 

 work on atomic weights was carried on in his laboratory and under 

 his direction, where three important determinations were made; he 

 also devised a method of determining some atomic weights which 

 had before been rather difficult to obtain. He published this method 

 after he was seventy years of age, and the method has since been 

 applied by others with good success. Processes requiring refine- 

 ment and consummate accuracy were attractive to him, as well as 

 some in which refinement and final accuracy are to be attained by 

 some future generation. In an important study of the physiological 

 effects of isomeric organic compounds on animals, he utilized his 

 early medical training. 



All Gibbs's activities were actuated by very high ideals. He 

 was little known by the public at large, even by the best part of the 

 public, but was greatly honored among scientific men. He was one 

 of the founders and original members of the National Academy of 

 Sciences and for some years was its president. He was president 

 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 

 1897-1898. He was an honorary member of the three great 

 chemical societies of the world and of the Prussian Academy of 

 Science, and several universities gave him honorary degrees. He 

 was a devoted scholar, glad to give his best efforts to the world, 

 highly valuing unsought approval, and never seeking other reward. 

 He was during the civil war, for several years an earnest and active 

 member of the Sanitary Commission. It was he who first suggested 

 that the ideas on which the Sanitary Commission was founded ought 

 to take the form of a club, and it was at a meeting in his house that 

 the Union League Club was established. 



In the words of Clarke: 



Gibbs was a man of striking personality, tall, erect and dignified. As 

 with most men of positive character, he had strong likes and dislikes, but 



