OLIVER WOLCOTT GIBBS 113 



paring to lop off from a beautiful old tree a great branch that 

 extended into a street through which he wished to move the 

 villa of a summer resident. When the man refused to listen 

 to remonstrances, I was left to guard the tree, while the Doc- 

 tor set off to find a policeman and finally routed out the 

 Mayor of Newport, with the result that the house had a 

 quarter mile more to travel and the tree was saved. 



I have already stated that Gibbs's opportunity to teach 

 advanced chemistry to students was limited to eight years: 

 Professor F. W. Clarke has given an authoritative account 

 of his teaching at this period, in his beautiful lecture before 

 the Chemical Society of London. 1 My own experience came 

 later, when I fortunately joined the very small class which 

 attended the course in Chemical Physics to which he confined 

 himself after 1871. The formal part of the lesson was fre- 

 quently dismissed in a few minutes, in which he handed out 

 his full lecture notes, to be copied at home: the remainder 

 of the hour was devoted to experimentation or to purely in- 

 formal discussion of problems arising out of the general topic. 

 I do not think that the subject was ever treated exhaustively, 

 but we all felt enriched and stimulated when the hour was 

 over. Unfortunately, the course was not correlated to any 

 other work in the University, and I doubt whether, at any 

 one time, more than a dozen undergraduates knew Professor 

 Gibbs by sight. 



Privileged, half a dozen years later, to assist him at his pri- 

 vate research laboratory, in Newport, I was able to observe 

 more closely his methods of thought and work. He belonged 

 emphatically to what might be termed the Berzelius type of 

 chemist, basing his views upon an intimate knowledge of the 

 reactions of a selected number of elements, and preferring 

 direct deduction from qualitative or quantitative evidence 



1 Journ. Chem. Soc. Trans. 95, 1299 (1909). 



