On his return to America, he was appointed librarian of Yale college and was professor of physical and political geography at the Sheffield Scientific school from 1856 to 1872, and did much to develop that institution in its early and formative years. During his residence in New Haven he was made a trustee of the Winchester astronomical observatory and a visitor of the Yale school of fine arts. He was superintendent of the New Haven city schools for a time, and was also secretary of the state board of education.
In 1861 he married Mary Ketcham, of New York. She died in 1869. In 1877 Doctor Gilman married a second time, Miss Elizabeth Dwight, daughter of John M. Woolsey of Cleveland and New Haven, and niece of President Woolsey of Yale.
From 1872 to 1875, he was president of the University of California. To the development of this institution he gave great thought and care. Its subsequent growth has been largely due to the plans he formed for it, and to the force and energy with which he set in motion new impulses and ideas in education. Doctor Gilman's attention has always been given more particularly to the interior influences and work of the institutions with which he has been connected, than to outside work and financing operations.
On December 30, 1874, he was elected president of the newly-founded Johns Hopkins university. May 1, 1875, he entered on his new duties. When Mr. Hopkins died, in 1873, he bequeathed $7,000,000 (up to that time the largest single gift ever made to education), to be divided equally between a hospital and the university. After extended inquiries, in their effort to find a man of such breadth of view and force of character as to make successful the first attempt in America to establish an institution to do distinctively post-graduate university work, Doctor Gilman was the choice of the trustees for president. A year was spent by him in formulating plans and in visiting men and institutions in Europe. The principles on which the university was founded were that it was to be free from partisan or ecclesiastical influence; its work was to be as special and as advanced as the state of the country would permit; its fame was to rest upon the character of the teachers and scholars and not upon numbers and buildings; it was to begin with a portion of the philosophical as distinct from a professional faculty; to emphasize research and to give special attention to literature and the sciences, particularly to those which bear on medicine. It has been said that "Balti-
