business, and then to botany, zoölogy, and geology, the new study of Sanskrit attracted him, and he went to New Haven to be a pupil of Professor Salisbury, the only professor of Sanskrit and Arabic in the United States, and who still survives in a venerable and honored old age. But I am not following him to Germany and back. I only want here to recall that as a philologist he was not a mere Sanskritist, and nothing else. He not only found all his knowledge helpful to his study of philology, but the breadth of his training and the variety of his discipline gave him soundness of judgment in the processes of his own peculiar study. I do not simply mean that it was only because he exactly understood the mathematics that underlies astronomy that he was competent to undertake the editing of a Sanskrit astronomical treatise, but rather that the bent and discipline which a mind gets in one study fits it better to reach sure conclusions in another. The mind trained to the severe methods of observation of actual facts in biological science could not help, for example, seeing the absurdity of following the unscientific traditions of Hindu grammarians. He could do nothing else but build his Sanskrit grammar out of the observed facts in the language of the Vedas and the later writings, throwing all the traditions overboard, and that, too, notwithstanding he was a proficient student of the native grammarians. He did not put botany or geology into his grammar, but he was the first to prepare a grammar on methods as purely scientific, as absolutely based on observation of facts of language and observed phonetic laws, as those he had first learned to employ
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THE WHITNEY MEMORIAL MEETING.
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