it has been—one of the prime guarantees of the permanence of democracy in America. Few places in this land have produced a proportionately greater number of distinguished people than has Northampton. Social advantages were thus added to those of birth, and to all these in turn the advantages of dwelling in a region of great natural beauty.
It was in William Whitney's early infancy that his father moved into a dwelling built on the precise site of the Jonathan Edwards house. This dwelling was the second in a row of six neighboring houses, all of which could boast of more or less notable occupants. In the first lived Dr. Seeger, who was educated at the same school and time as Schiller, at "the Solitude." Beyond the Whitneys' was the house in which lived Lewis S. Hopkins, the father of Edward W. Hopkins, the Sanskrit scholar of Bryn Mawr. The fourth was the original homestead of the Timothy Dwights, in which the first Yale President of that name, and Theodore, the Secretary of the Hartford Convention and founder of the New York "Daily Advertiser," were born, both grandsons of Jonathan Edwards. The adjoining place was the home of the elder Sylvester Judd, and of his son Sylvester, the author of "Margaret;" and the sixth house was occupied by the Italian political exile, Gherardi, and later by Dr. William Allen, ex-President of Bowdoin College.
Whitney was a mere boy of fifteen when he entered Williams College as a sophomore. Three years later (in 1845) he had easily outstripped all his classmates and graduated with the highest honors; and with all that, he found ample time to range the wooded hills of Berkshire, collecting birds, which he himself set up for the Natural History Society. The next three or four years were spent by him as clerk in the Northampton Bank, with accounts for his work, German and Swedish for his studies, ornithology and botany for his recreations, and music for his delight,—unless one should rather say that all was his delight. These oft-mentioned studies in natural history I should not linger over, save that their deep significance has hardly been adverted upon in public. They mean that, even at this early age, Whitney showed the stuff which distinguishes the genuine man of science from the jobbers and peddlers of learning. They mean that, with him, the gift of independent and accurate observation was inborn, and that the habit of unprejudiced reflection upon what he himself saw was easily acquired.
This brings us to a critical period in the determination of his career. In the encyclopedias, Whitney is catalogued as a famous Indianist, and so indeed he was. But it was not because he was an Indianist that he was famous. Had he devoted his life to the physical or natural sciences, he would doubtless have attained to equal, if not greater eminence. Truly, it is not the what, but the how! That he did devote himself to Indology appears to be due to several facts which were in themselves and in their concomitance accidental. First, his elder brother, Josiah, now the distinguished professor of geology in Harvard University, on his return from Europe in 1847, had brought with him books in and on many languages, and among them a copy of the second edition of Bopp's Sanskrit Grammar. Second, it chanced that the Rev. George E. Day, a college-mate at Yale of Professor Salisbury, was Whitney's pastor. And third, he met with Eduard Desor.
There is in possession of Professor Whitney of Harvard a well-worn volume of his father's called the Family Fact-book. It is, I am sure, no breach of confidence if I say, in passing, that this book, with its varied entries in all varied moods and by divers gifted hands, is the reflex of a most remarkable family life and feeling. In it, among many other things, are brief autobiographic annals of the early life of William Whitney, and in its proper place the following simple entry: "In the winter of 1848-49 commenced the study of Sanskrit, encouraged to it by Rev. George E. Day. In June, 1849, went out with Josiah to Lake Superior as 'assistant sub-agent' on the Geological
