JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS. 



[Reprinted with some additions from the American Journal of Science, 

 ser. 4, vol. xvi., September, 1903.] 



JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS was born in New Haven, Connecticut, 

 February 11, 1839, and died in the same city, April 28, 1903. He 

 was descended from Robert Gibbs, the fourth son of Sir Henry Gibbs 

 of Honington, Warwickshire, who came to Boston about 1658. One of 

 Robert Gibbs's grandsons, Henry Gibbs, in 1747 married Katherine, 

 daughter of the Hon. Josiah Willard, Secretary of the Province of 

 Massachusetts, and of the descendants of this couple, in various parts 

 of the country, no fewer than six have borne the name Josiah Willard 

 Gibbs. 



The subject of this memorial was the fourth child and only son of 

 Josiah Willard Gibbs, Professor of Sacred Literature in the Yale 

 Divinity School from 1824 to 1861, and of his wife, Mary Anna, 

 daughter of Dr. John Van Cleve of Princeton, N.J. The elder 

 Professor Gibbs was remarkable among his contemporaries for pro- 

 found scholarship, for unusual modesty, and for the conscientious and 

 painstaking accuracy which characterized all of his published work. 

 The following brief extracts from a discourse commemorative of his 

 life, by Professor George P. Fisher, can hardly fail to be of interest to 

 those who are familiar with the work of his distinguished son : " One 

 who should look simply at the writings of Mr. Gibbs, where we meet 

 only with naked, laboriously classified, skeleton-like statements of 

 scientific truth, might judge him to be devoid of zeal even in his 

 favorite pursuit. But there was a deep fountain of feeling that did 

 not appear in these curiously elaborated essays. ... Of the science 

 of comparative grammar, as I am informed by those most competent 

 to judge, he is to be considered in relation to the scholars of this 

 country as the leader/' Again, in speaking of his unfinished trans- 

 lation of Gesenius's Hebrew Lexicon : " But with his wonted 

 thoroughness, he could not leave a word until he had made the article 

 upon it perfect, sifting what the author had written by independent 

 investigations of his own." 



The ancestry of the son presents other points of interest. On his 

 G.I. b 



