Dear Sir,—I feel deeply obliged for having been offered an opportunity to express my heartfelt sympathy with the American Oriental Society on the melancholy occasion of Professor William Dwight Whitney's decease, and to testify my high esteem for his scholarship.
It would be impossible for me to give anything like an adequate idea of my consternation and utter dismay on receiving so unexpected an intelligence; nothing up to Professor Whitney's latest publications would have authorized an apprehension that his career, splendid from its first beginning and sustaining this character to the last, was about to close. For it is not the least admirable feature in the deceased's scholarship that it revealed itself from the very first in its characteristic perfection; there was no uncertainty, no wavering, no defectiveness about him; whatever he undertook to treat of, he knew all about it to perfection, and his works will be forever remarkable for clearness and terseness, correctness and exhaustiveness. Permit me to repeat a few lines from a paper I have issued some months ago, what time the Congress of Orientalists was assembled at Geneva:
"It is with no small degree of regret and reluctance that I give now a limited share of publicity to the following pages, that were originally destined in another form to meet the eyes and to appeal to the sound judgment, to the impartial mind, and to the extensive learning of one who is now no more among the living. Suddenly and unexpectedly he has been snatched away; much it is that he has done, and no man can say what he might not still have achieved; the much he has done, has been well done, so well that it would be difficult to say how he might have been outdone."
But it would be a vain endeavor to comprehend within the compass of a few lines the praise of one whose best and truest encomium will always remain his own works and what he has
