Another historical fact must be mentioned here which is very characteristic of the state of the science of physics in those days, and which is closely connected with the progress of this science as it appeared to me in the course of the last forty years. I mention now another great American physicist whose name, like that of Rowland, I first heard mentioned at Cambridge at that time, and that was Professor Josiah Willard Gibbs, of Yale. I know that many of my young colleagues will find it strange that I never had heard of Lord Rayleigh, of England, before I graduated at Columbia. What will they say when they hear that at that time I never had heard of famous Willard Gibbs, of Yale, New Haven, U. S. A.? Will they charge me with extraordinary ignorance, for which Columbia of those days was to blame? That would be unjust, as the following story will prove. One evening, after dinner, I was enjoying at the University Club, New York, the company of some twelve Yale graduates, and one of them was the learned Professor William Welch, dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was then president of the National Academy of Sciences. Most of my Yale friends present were of about my age or even older. I offered to wager that the majority of them would fail to give the name of the scientist who, in Doctor Welch’s opinion and in mine, was the greatest scientist that Yale had ever graduated. Not one of them mentioned Willard Gibbs. When I mentioned his name they frankly confessed that they had never heard of him before. Neither they nor Yale College of those days were to blame. Did my fellow students at Cambridge, who were training for the mathematical tripos, ever hear of him before they came to Cambridge? If they did, it was by accident, just as I heard of him by accident. Such was the spirit of the times in those days; and it was against this spirit that President Barnard of Columbia took up arms. He considered its existence a national calamity. But I shall return to this point later.