346 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



started from the marriage, in 1747, of Henry Gibbs with Katherine, 

 daughter of the Honorable Josiah Willard, Secretary of the Prov- 

 ince of Massachusetts. The grandfather of Henry Gibbs, Robert 

 Gibbs, fourth son of Sir Henry Gibbs of Honington, Warwickshire, 

 came to Boston about 1658. 



Professor Gibbs inherited both his scholarly tastes and his 

 disposition from his father, Josiah Willard Gibbs, a distinguished 

 philologian, who was Professor of Sacred Literature in Yale 

 Divinity School from 1824 to 1861. He was born in Salem, 

 Massachusetts, in 1790, and was graduated from Yale in 1809, his 

 father, grandfather and great-grandfather having been graduates of 

 Harvard. What is said of him is quite as descriptive of his greater 

 son. "The elder Professor Gibbs was remarkable among his 

 contemporaries for profound scholarship, for unusual modesty 

 and for the conscientious and painstaking accuracy which charac- 

 terized all his published work." He married Mary Anna Van 

 Cleve, the daughter of John Van Cleve of Princeton, New Jersey, 

 and the great-great-granddaughter of Rev. Jonathan Dickinson 

 (Y. C., 1706), the first President of the College of New Jersey. 



Until 1846, Professor Gibbs occupied the house of President 

 Day on Crown Street near College Street, and there all his children 

 were born. The President meantime lived on the Campus in a 

 house belonging to the College. When he retired from the Presi- 

 dency he took possession again of his own house, and Professor 

 Gibbs built on High Street. 



His fourth child and only son, the subject of this sketch, was 

 born February n, 1839. An attack of scarlet fever when he was 

 two years old left him with a somewhat delicate constitution, 

 which was the cause of much anxiety to his parents and required 

 of him through life a careful attention to health and regular habits. 



He owed his preparation for college to the Hopkins Grammar 

 School, of New Haven, and he generously repaid his obligation 

 to this school by serving as one of its trustees for twenty-two years 

 until his death. For seventeen years he was Secretary and Treas- 

 urer of the Hopkins School, and was diligent and efficient in the 

 management of its financial affairs. 



