collaborators" who, next to the authors, Boehtlingk and Roth, contributed most to this monumental work.
Of all his technical works, his "Sanskrit Grammar," with its elaborate supplement, "The Roots, Verb-forms, and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language," forms the crowning achievement. Here he casts off the bonds of tradition wherever they might hamper his free scientific procedure, and approaches the phenomena of language in essentially the same spirit and attitude of mind as that in which Darwin or Helmholtz grappled the problems of their sciences. The language is treated historically, and as the product of life and growth; and the work is filled with the results of scores of minute and far-reaching special investigations. The amount of material which is here subjected to rigorous and original methods of classification and scientific induction is enormous; and none but those who were familiar with his writing-table can well realize the self-restraint that he used in order to bring his results into moderate compass.
In all these technical works there is little that appeals to the popular imagination, and absolutely nothing to catch the applause of the groundlings; but much, on the other hand, to win the confidence of the judicious. It was therefore natural that Whitney should be sought as editor-in-chief for what is in every sense by far the greatest lexicographical achievement of America, "The Century Dictionary." And despite the ability and size of the editorial staff, we may well believe that this office was no sinecure; for the settlement of the principles of procedure demanded the full breadth of learning, the largeness of view, and the judicial temper of a master mind. Among the great body of his countrymen, this will be Whitney's best-known monument.
Mr. Whitney was a genuine lover of nature and of the world out of doors no less than of his books; and so, with his keen sense of humor and love of fun, he was a charming companion for the woods and hills. Physical courage, too, abounded, often with a daring impulse to meet bodily risk and danger, as when he climbed the so-called Look-off Pine, about one hundred and thirty feet high, a monarch overtopping the primeval forests of the Ontonagon River, and broke off its top as a trophy; or as when, with his brother, he indulged in the youthful escapade of passing the forbidden point of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral by clambering out and around the point of obstruction on the outside, and of mounting thence toward the summit as far as there was any opening within the spire large enough to contain a man's body. He was intensely American, in the best sense of the word; and his patriotism, aside from its loftier manifestations (of which a moment later), showed itself in some lesser ways not unpleasing to recall. In describing his passage through the wilds of the Detroit River, he says in that youthful journal, "There was little difference in the appearance of the two sides; but I endeavored to persuade myself that the American offered evidence of more active and successful industry than the British."
I venture to quote in part the words and in part the substance of a recent letter from one of his old pupils. There is no one, said this pupil, whose privilege it was to know him more intimately, who could not speak of the deep tenderness underlying his ordinary reserve, of his profound sympathy with difficulty and misfortune, and of his ever-steadfast loyalties. Of the last a touching illustration is found in his remembrance of the Schaal family, in whose house auf dem Graben he lodged during his Túbingen summers of 1851 and 1852. Nearly forty years later he wrote to this pupil, then in Tübingen, asking him to seek out the Schaals, and to be the bearer of kindly messages to them. Fraulein Schaal spoke of the delight her mother and herself had felt at the messages sent them by the professor who had become so celebrated, but who had not forgotten them, and showed the visitor Professor Whitney's room, all unchanged, a typical
