xxvi JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS. 



to the accuracy of anything which he published, nor indeed did he 

 underestimate its importance; but he seemed to regard it in an 

 entirely impersonal way and never doubted, apparently, that what he 

 had accomplished could have been done equally well by almost anyone 

 who might have happened to give his attention to the same problems. 

 Those nearest him for many years are constrained to believe that he 

 never realized that he was endowed with most unusual powers of 

 mind ; there was never any tendency to make the importance of his 

 work an excuse for neglecting even the most trivial of his duties as 

 an officer of the college, and he was never too busy to devote, at once, 

 as much time and energy as might be necessary to any of his students 

 who privately sought his assistance. 



Although long intervals sometimes elapsed between his publications 

 his habits of work were steady and systematic ; but he worked alone 

 and, apparently, without need of the stimulus of personal conversation 

 upon the subject, or of criticism from others, which is often helpful 

 even when the critic is intellectually an inferior. So far from pub- 

 lishing partial results, he seldom, if ever, spoke of what he was doing 

 until it was practically in its final and complete form. This was his 

 chief limitation as a teacher of advanced students; he did not take 

 them into his confidence with regard to his current work, and even 

 when he lectured upon a subject in advance of its publication (as was 

 the case for a number of years before the appearance of the Statistical 

 Mechanics) the work was really complete except for a few finishing 

 touches. Thus his students were deprived of the advantage of seeing 

 his great structures in process of building, of helping him in 4 the 

 details, and of being in such ways encouraged to make for themselves 

 attempts similar in character, however small their scale. But on the 

 other hand, they owe to him a debt of gratitude for an introduction 

 into the profounder regions of natural philosophy such as they could 

 have obtained from few other living teachers. Always carefully 

 prepared, his lectures were marked by the same great qualities as his 

 published papers and were, in addition, enriched by many apt and 

 simple illustrations which can never be forgotten by those who heard 

 them. No necessary qualification to a statement was ever omitted, 

 and, on the other hand, it seldom failed to receive the most general 

 application of which it was capable ; his students had ample oppor- 

 tunity to learn what may be regarded as known, what is guessed 

 at, what a proof is, and how far it goes. Although he disregarded 

 many of the shibboleths of the mathematical rigorists, his logical 

 processes were really of the most severe type ; in power of deduction, 

 of generalization, in insight into hidden relations, in critical acumen, 

 utter lack of prejudice, and in the philosophical breadth of his view 

 of the object and aim of physics, he has had few superiors in the 



