THE 



AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS. 



JosiAH WiLLAED GiBBs was bom in New Haven, Connecti- 

 cut, 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. Yan Cleve of Princeton, 'N. J. 

 The elder Professor Gibbs was remarkable among his contem- 

 poraries for profound 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 scien- 

 tific 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 rela- 

 tion to the scholars of this country as the leader." Again, in 



Am. Jour. Scl — Fourth Series, Yol. XYI, No. 93.— September, 1903. 

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