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ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
the deposited metals could be directly weighed — thus providing a simple 
and exact quantitative method for the analysis of substances containing 
these metals. The fact that a German, Luckow, afterwards stated that 
he had used the method for copper before Gibbs had used it, does not de¬ 
tract from the real originality of Gibbs’s idea; for Luckow’s work was 
wholly unknown to Gibbs. 
From time to time throughout all Gibbs’s long period of scientific ac¬ 
tivity there appeared papers from his pen describing other new and useful 
methods of quantitative analysis, many of which have been incorporated 
into the common analytical practise of to-day. For example, his sand-filter¬ 
ing device of 1867 may be said to have been a forerunner of the present ad¬ 
mirable apparatus perfected by Gooch and Munroe. 
Not long after coming to Harvard, Gibbs turned his attention to the pre¬ 
cise vise of the spectrometer in chemical investigations, and this work was 
continued in 1875. Throughout all this time the subject of his work with 
Genth was only half dormant in his mind, and occasional theoretical or 
experimental papers concerning the peculiar nature of cobaltamine com 
pounds showed his devotion to his early choice. 
Not content with the paradoxes and puzzles offered by these complex 
bases, or with the other abstruse subjects mentioned, he attacked in suc¬ 
ceeding years the complex inorganic acids, composed of various combina¬ 
tions of tungstic, molybdic, phosphoric, arsenic, antimonic and vanadic 
acids. One cannot help wishing, upon studying his patient and careful 
quest among the bewildering phenomena manifested by these singular sub¬ 
stances, that he had had the assistance of modern physical chemistry. But 
our present knowledge was not then at any one’s disposal, and Gibbs did 
his best with the means at his command, devoting himself for a number of 
years to the expansion and systematizing of the work in this but slightly 
cultivated field. 
From inorganic chemistry he later turned for a short time to a very differ¬ 
ent subject, undertaking with H. A. Hare and E. T. Reichert, a systematic 
study of the action of definitely related chemical compounds upon animals. 
This research, which appeared in 1891 and 1892, together with occasional 
previous papers upon organic chemistry, afforded evidence of the breadth 
of his interest. 
Keen as his sense of the importance of physiological chemistry became, 
it was not keen enough to divert him wholly from his devotion to the rarer 
substances of the inorganic world, as his following paper on the oxides 
contained in cerite, samarskite, gadolinite and fergusonite testified. 
Although Wolcott Gibbs was essentially an experimentalist, he was one 
of the first of Amercan chemists to appreciate the importance of thermodyn- 
