MORRIS LOEB 



as a physician. His taste for physics and chemistry developed 

 early; he published one or two papers as an undergraduate, 

 worked with Dr. Robert Hare in Philadelphia in 1842, and 

 went abroad in 1845 to specialize in chemistry, under Ram- 

 melsberg and Heinrich Rose in Berlin, and under Laurent, 

 Dumas, and Regnault in Paris. Returning in 1848, he lec- 

 tured at Delaware College and the College of Physicians and 

 Surgeons, and was appointed Professor of Physics and Chem- 

 istry at the Free Academy of New York City, now the Col- 

 lege of the City of New York, but then practically of high 

 school grade. Here he taught, chiefly by lectures and reci- 

 tations, until 1863, when he was called to Harvard to fill 

 the Rumford Professorship on the Application of Science 

 to the Useful Arts, then recently vacated by Eben Horsford. 

 Attached to this professorship was the Chemical Laboratory 

 of the Lawrence Scientific School, but this was consolidated 

 with the College Laboratory in 1871, under Professor J. P. 

 Cooke, and Professor Gibbs thereafter limited himself to 

 courses in Physical Chemistry, continuing his chemical in- 

 vestigations with the aid of paid assistants. 



In 1887, he was made Professor Emeritus, and retired to 

 Newport, Rhode Island, where he had always spent his sum- 

 mers on property long in the possession of his family. Here 

 he built a small laboratory, overlooking the beach, in which 

 he continued to work for another decade, until his waning 

 strength warned him to desist. He had lost his dearly loved 

 wife, Josephine Mauran, shortly before his retirement from 

 Cambridge, and he lived very quietly at Newport, attended 

 by a devoted niece, interesting himself chiefly in horticulture 

 as a pastime. He had little taste for the fine arts, but was 

 passionately fond of nature and a friend of all living things. 

 I vividly remember his indignation, one day, when, in the 

 course of a walk, we came across a contractor who was pre- 



