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 subagent' on the Geological Survey." To William Whitney were intrusted the botany, the barometrical observations, and the accounts. And although the ornithology was not formally intrusted to him, there is abundant evidence that he was habitually on the look-out for the birds, with keen eye and with attentive ear. He must, already, in the spring, have made substantial progress by himself in Sanskrit; for his article (almost the first that he published) entitled "On the Sanskrit Language," a translation and abridgment of von Bohlen, appeared in the Augnist number of the "Bibliotheca Sacra" for 1849, and must therefore have been finished before he left home. With him, accordingly, he took his brother's copy of Bopp.
Besides the two brothers, there was a third man-of-
