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 titles 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
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