348 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



In July, 1871, two years after his return to America, he was 

 elected Professor of Mathematical Physics at Yale, a position which 

 he held to the time of his death thirty-two years later. 



It was at first an empty honor, for the university to which he 

 was attached was slow to recognize his genius. For the first ten 

 years of his professorship he received no salary whatever and little 

 more than half the regular salary for several years thereafter. The 

 most important service that a university can do to the world is 

 the early recognition and encouragement of men of exceptional 

 ability who are willing to devote their lives to the extension of 

 human knowledge, yet this is the service most likely to be neglected. 

 Yale has no name upon her roll of honor that stands for more origi- 

 nality and profundity in science than that of Gibbs, but it is a mere 

 chance that it was not lost to her. When the Johns Hopkins 

 University was started, Gibbs was invited to join its faculty, and, 

 as the story goes, had already written a letter of acceptance intend- 

 ing to mail it the next morning, but Professor Thatcher happening 

 to call on him that evening he mentioned what he had done and 

 referred to the envelope on the mantelpiece before them. His 

 friend begged him to hold it for a few days, and then hurried out 

 to urge upon the authorities of the university the importance of 

 retaining Gibbs in the institution. Some hasty councils were held, 

 a small salary promised and Gibbs, gratified by this unexpected 

 token of appreciation, was glad to agree to remain in New Haven. 

 This intervention Professor Rowland of the Johns Hopkins was 

 accustomed to call "the greatest crime of the century," believ- 

 ing that Gibbs would have found greater scope for his powers and 

 would have exerted a wider influence in a university having a 

 larger corps of graduate students than Yale had at that time. But 

 it is hard to conceive of Gibbs in any other environment than 

 that of Yale, and it is doubtful if his peculiar genius would have 

 thrived elsewhere. 



In 1873, when he was thirty-four years old, he published his 

 first paper, a discussion of the methods for the geometrical repre- 

 sentation of the thermodynamical properties of bodies. The 

 most common of such graphical methods is the volume-pressure 



