256 Wolcott Gibba. 



students of the university of the teaching of the best chemist 

 in the country, and diminished the volume of his original 

 work, since up to a certain point the amount of chemical pro- 

 duction is directly proportional to the number of hands at the 

 disposal of the master. Yet a study of his papers shows that, 

 when his time was occupied by the administration of a labora- 

 tory and more elementary teaching, he did not produce those 

 extended researches on which his fame principally rests, as 

 these date from the earlier and later periods, when his whole 

 energy was concentrated on work of his own with, in the later 

 period, one skilled private assistant. 



His two earlier investigations of this sort had to do with 

 subjects so abstruse and difficult that most chemists would have 

 shuddered at the idea of attacking them, but, as he once said, 

 he was a pioneer, and seemed to enjoy nothing more than 

 breaking a way through these tangled jungles on the frontier 

 of the science. Accordingly he next took up a field of work — 

 the complex acids of tungsten and molybdenum — even more 

 terrible, for here it takes courage merely to read his papers, 

 and follow his footsteps through the bewildering maze of 

 series after series of compounds. What then must it have 

 been to find the necessary clue to this labyrinth, and to estab- 

 lish the nature of these numerous compounds ? Especially 

 since in doing this it was necessary for him to work out some 

 of the most difficult problems of analytical chemistry, as the 

 separation of many of the elements involved had never been 

 attempted before. In this great investigation over fifty new 

 series of compounds were discovered by him, and the old series 

 fully investigated and put on a solid foundation. The first 

 paper appeared in 1877, and the last in 1896, this being the 

 last paper published by him. 



The invention of the ring burner, his most important con- 

 tribution to the apparatus of analytical chemistry, dates from 

 1873, just after his transfer to the Department of Physics ; and 

 his porous diaphragms for heating precipitates in gases were 

 described in the same year. In 1877 appeared his excellent 

 method for preparing nitrogen. 



In 1887 he became professor emeritus, and retired to New- 

 port, where he continued his work on the complex acids in a 



