Corresponding Secretary, which from the beginning carried with it the duty of editing the publications, was devolved upon him; and he bore its burdens for twenty-seven years. Add to this eighteen years as Librarian and six as President, and we have an aggregate of fifty-one years of official service. The American Philological Association, too, is under deep obligation to Whitney. He was one of its founders, and, very fittingly, its first president. For many years he was one of the most constant attendants at its meetings, a valued counsellor, and one of its most faithful helpers and contributors.
Some might think it a matter of little importance, but it is certainly a significant one, that, after paying his Oriental Society assessments for about thirty-five years, at last, and when facing mortal illness, he paid over the considerable sum required to make himself a life member. A little later,—for the candle still burned,—and with strictest injunction of secrecy during his lifetime, he sent to the Treasurer his check for a thousand dollars of his modest savings, to help toward defraying the Society's expenses of publication, and in the hope that it might serve as a "suggestion and encouragement to others to do likewise."
Added to all this was his service in keeping up the very high scientific standard of the Society's publications. The work of judging and selecting required wide knowledge, and the making of abstracts much labor; while the revision or recasting of the papers of tyros unskilled in writing demanded endless painstaking, not always met by gratitude and docility. All this cost him a lavish bestowal of time, of which hardly any one in the Society knew, and that for the reason that he took no steps to have them know. So exemplary was his freedom from self-seeking in all his relations with the Society.
The rehearsal of the tides of Mr. Whitney's books and treatises would give to this address too much the character of a bibliographical essay; and, besides, it would merely tend to impress hearers who are accustomed to count volumes rather than to weigh them. His distinguishing qualities, as reflected in his work, are everywhere so palpable that it is not hard to describe them. Perhaps the most striking and pervading one is that which Professor Lounsbury calls his "thorough intellectual sanity." In reading his arguments, whether constructive or critical, one can hardly help exclaiming, How near to first principles are the criteria of the most advanced theories and high-stepping deliverances! With him, the impulse to prick the bubble of windy hypothesis upon the diamond-needle (as the Hindus call it) of hard common-sense was often irresistible, and sometimes irresistibly funny. Witness this passage from his boyish journal: "On entering the river [the St. Mary's], we found ourselves in an archipelago of small islands, which stretches from the Sault down to the foot of the Georgian Bay. says [that] actually visited thirty-six thousand such islands,...which in my opinion is a whopper. To have done it, he must have stopped upon ten a day, every day for ten years." This may seem trivial. In fact, it is typical. It is in essence the same kind of treatment that he gave in later life to any loose statement or extravagant theory, although printed in the most dignified journal and propounded by the most redoubtable authority.
Breadth and thoroughness are ever at war with each other in men, for that men are finite. The gift of both in large measure and at once,—this marks the man of genius. That the gift was Whitney's is clear to any one who considers the versatility of his mind, the variousness of his work, and the quality of his results. As professor of Sanskrit, technical work in grammar, lexicography, text-criticism, and the like, lay nearest to him; but with all this, he still found strength to illuminate by his insight many questions of general linguistic theory, the origin of language, phonetics, the difficult subject of Hindu astronomy and the question of its derivation, the method and
