Page:Scientific Papers of Josiah Willard Gibbs.djvu/21



was born in New Haven, Connecticut, 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. John Van Cleve of Princeton, N.J. The Elder Professor Gibbs was remarkable among his contemporaries 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 scientific 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 relation to the scholars of this country as the leader." Again, in speaking of his unfinished translation of Gesenius's Hebrew Lexicon: "But with his wonted thoroughness, he could not leave a word until he had made the article upon it perfect, sifting what the author had written by independent investigators of his own."

The ancestry of the son presents other points of interest. On his Rh