IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
12 
periodical in America. Tho of excellent character it met with the fate 
of many another worthy journalistic attempt thru lack of support. It 
may be stated here that Dr. Bruce gave in this journal a description of 
the Native Magnesia of Hoboken and of the Red Zinc Oxide of Sussex 
county. New Jersey, the first American species described by an American 
mineralogist. It is said that so well was his work done that these species 
remain today essentially as he described them, and that his papers are 
models of accuracy and form of statement. 
Colonel Gibbs, a young man of considerable means, was an enthus- 
iastic mineralogist and while in Europe made the most extensive and 
valuable collection of minerals ever brought to America, embracing more 
than twenty thousand specimens. Having found in Professor Silliman 
a zealous and sj^mpathetic student in his favorite science, he proposed 
to install his cabinet at Yale College, if suitable accommodations were pro- 
vided for it by the corporation. The proposition was promptly accepted, 
the cabinet was arranged under the personal supervision of its owner and 
it was then thrown open to the use of the college and the public. After 
fifteen years of free use of this collection, the college authorities pur- 
chased it for $20,000. It was a most profitable investment for the insti- 
tution enabling it thus early to secure a prominence in mineralogy which 
under a distinguished line of mineralogists it has maintained ever since. 
Colonel Gibbs was also a very successful collector of minerals in this 
country, traveling wiuely for this purpose, freely gave of his time and 
knowledge to those interested in minerals, offered prizes to students 
making unusual attainments in the science, contributed important papers 
in scientific periodicals and in other ways proved a zealous promoter of 
interest in the study of mineralogy. 
Hitherto little had been published in the English language that would 
serve as a text book for the schools. In England Kirwin’s and Jameson’s 
publications were either too old, or too much given to the defense of a 
particular phase of the subject, to be of value in securing a broad and 
up-to-date knowledge of the subject, but in 1816 Professor Parker Cleave- 
land of Bowdoin College published an Elementary Treatise on Miner- 
alogy and Geology. It met with immediate general acceptance being of 
a high order of merit and receiving commendation even from the leading 
mineralogists of all Europe. Two editions were soon exhausted and a 
third was urgently called for, but unfortunately the author had been 
required to give his energies to the newly established Medical School at 
Brunswick and he could not respond to the demand, tho his lectures 
upon the subject were continued till his death which occurred in 1858. 
The feeling cannot be avoided that in his enforced withdrawal from a 
more exclusive devotion to the subject, mineralogy in America lost a 
masterly champion. 
The good fortune of Yale in securing the very superior cabinet of 
Colonel Gibbs has already been noted. But as cabinets, any more than 
buildings and equipments, do not make a great school of themselves, 
Yale’s good fortune would have availed but little without the directing 
and vitalizing powers and activities of a young man upon her faculty at 
that time, Professor Benjamin Silliman, who was one of the earliest to' 
