Wolcott Gills. 253 



WOLCOTT GIBBS. 



Wolcott Gibbs, for many years an associate editor of this 

 Journal, and during the last part of his scientific career the 

 most commanding figure in American chemistry, was born in 

 New York, February 21, 1822. 'His father, Colonel George 

 Gibbs, was one of the earliest American mineralogists, and is 

 commemorated in the mineral Gibbsite. He was a friend of 

 the elder Silliman, and his fine collection, deposited in New 

 Haven in 1812 and purchased in 1825, became the foundation 

 of the mineral cabinet of Yale College. His mother, Laura 

 Wolcott Gibbs, was the daughter of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary 

 of the Treasury during part of the administrations of Wash- 

 ington and John Adams, and granddaughter of the signer of 

 the Declaration of Independence of the same name. The 

 child, who was the second son, was named Oliver Wolcott 

 Gibbs, but, as he disliked the name of Oliver, he dropped it 

 in early life, and is known to the scientific world as Wolcott 

 Gibbs. 



The taste for science inherited from his father was not slow 

 in appearing, for, as he tells us, even in his early childhood, 

 which was passed mostly at his father's large estate called 

 Sunswick on Long Island a few miles from New York, " he 

 was often occupied with making volcanoes with such materials 

 as he could obtain, and in searching the stone walls on the 

 estate for minerals and the gardens and fields for flowers." 



At the age of seven he went to live with William Ellery 

 Channing, the great Unitarian divine, who had married his 

 aunt, but he was under the special care of another aunt, Miss 

 Sarah Gibbs. The winters were passed in a fine house on Mt. 

 Vernon street, Boston, and the summers at Oakland, a beauti- 

 ful estate about five miles from Newport, R. I. The fame of 

 Dr. Channing brought many foreign visitors, especially in sum- 

 mer, and this stimulating mental atmosphere, to which the 

 boy was exposed for Hve years, had a marked effect on his 

 intellectual development. 



In 1837 he entered Columbia College, and his first original 

 work dates from his junior year there. It consisted of a new 



