110 MORRIS LOEB 



advancement of science. The Union League and Century 

 Clubs, of New York City, owe their foundation largely to his 

 efforts, just as did the National Academy of Science in Wash- 

 ington; his effectiveness as a member of theU. S. Sanitary 

 Commission, during the Civil War, seemed to have exacted 

 the lifelong respect of all his associates. 



While, therefore, it was an inestimable gain to the Law- 

 rence Scientific School to secure this master of research, one 

 cannot help wondering whether the narrowness which kept 

 him out of his own alma mater, and forced him to leave the 

 city of his birth, did not curtail some of his most useful powers. 

 Furthermore, the policy which subsequent events have proved 

 thoroughly mistaken, of reducing the Lawrence Scientific 

 School in 1871 from its status as virtually a graduate faculty 

 of natural and exact science, to a shadowy existence as an 

 appendage of Harvard College, deprived Professor Gibbs 

 of his teaching laboratory, and barred American students of 

 chemistry from working under the direction of a guide who 

 remained for another quarter of a century the master of in- 

 organic research. In fact, during less than eight years of 

 his entire career was he in a position to assign topics for 

 independent research to students in his laboratory, and thus 

 carry out those parallel tests which are the great resource of 

 the modern university professor. Thus it is that the figure 

 of Wolcott Gibbs, even though so recently faded from our 

 eyes, towers in our memory like that of one of the early 

 frontiersmen blazing out new paths in a primeval forest; 

 like the heroes of James Fenimore Cooper, who seek the 

 wilderness from love of nature, not from hatred of man, and 

 who are solitary, not from a saturnine disposition, but from 

 lack of followers willing to forsake easy harvest for the chances 

 of a laborious chase. 



But to those who were his immediate contemporaries, 



