72 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, ^t 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 e.\act 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 : '"' 



" My 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. i, pp. 365, 366. The amount 

 of the fund was $2,600. Professor Gibbs was subsequently President of the Academy. 



