An American professor, eminent as a philologist and editor, born in Northampton, Mass., Feb. 9, 1827; died at New Haven, Conn., June 7, 1894. He graduated at Williams College, 1845; spent some years abroad in study; in 1854 was made professor of Sanskrit at Yale, in 1870 of comparative philology, holding both positions till death. His writings are authority on all philological questions, and his rank as a Sanskrit scholar is of the first order. From 1849 he was a member of the American Oriental Society, and its president from 1884. His contributions to the North American Review, the New Englander, and other periodicals were numerous and varied. His earliest work was the preparation, in company with Rudolph Roth, of Tübingen, of an edition of the Atharva Veda Sanhita (Berlin, 1856). Among his other works are: “Language and the Study of Language” (1867); “On Material and Form in Language” (1872); “Darwinism and Language” (1847); “Logical Consistency in Views of Language” (1880); “Mixture in Language” (1881); “The Study of Hindu Grammar and the Study of Sanskrit” (1884); “The Upanishads and their Latest Translation” (1886). He has also written: “Compendious German Grammar” (1869); “German Reader in Prose and Verse” (1870); “Essentials of English Grammar” (1877); “Sanskrit Grammar” (1877); and “Practical French Grammar” (1886). Professor Whitney was the superintending editor of the “Century Dictionary” (1889–91), and assisted in the preparation of “Webster’s Dictionary” (1864).

Personal

  Mr. Whitney was no recluse, nor a typical professor in manner. He attracted men to him and enjoyed being with them. He was not at all emotional, however, and cared little for general society…. Like Aristotle’s “magnanimous man,” he gave little heed to praise or blame—not being elated or cast down by either. He loved learning for its own sake and not for its reward of fame.

  The prince of American scholars.

General

  First published [“Oriental and Linguistic Studies”] in the “Journal of the American Oriental Society” and our heavy reviews, they are now collected for us, and thousands who had never seen them will read them gladly…. Thoroughness is his most marked characteristic. Then there are few books of such depth and compass as his, expressed with as much simplicity. And compression never fails. In a wonderfully small space we get a sufficient body of facts for a general understanding of the history of Vedic study, of the Vedas themselves, and their relations to modern mind and life. Now and then the author rises with his thought to rhythm and eloquence. The essay on the Avesta has the same merits…. In two articles on Max Müller’s “Lectures on Language,” (in which Professor Whitney is very exacting), and in those which follow,… Professor Whitney sets forth his views of the nature of language against Müller, Bleek, Schleicher, and Steinthal…. When we read Professor Whitney’s statements of his own views, we assent; but when we read his assaults on others, we often dissent. The fact seems to be that this region of language is under the concurrent jurisdiction of the will and the unconscious involuntary activities; so that those who would exclude the will from it, and those who would make the will sole cause in it, alike err.

  The philological views with which Professor Whitney is identified are presented [“Life and Growth of Language”] in a clear and compendious shape, with no mass of details and side-issues to distract or seduce the reader.

  In this country he is known chiefly as a comparative philologist, and a writer upon the problems of linguistic science. But his reputation as a scholar rests rather upon his work in Sanskrit. His grammar of the Vedic dialect is an enduring monument of labour, accuracy and scholarship…. Prof. Whitney was lacking in imagination; but he had a clear and logical mind, and did not shrink from carrying out the premisses he adopted to their logical conclusions. He was the opponent of all theories which made language an organic product: it was to him merely a human “institution.”

  Perhaps Mr. Whitney’s most important service to Sanskrit philology was the preparation of his “Sanskrit Grammar, including both the classical language and older dialects, of Veda and Brahmana.”… No one has done so much as Mr. Whitney to teach sound views of linguistic science. Although the writer of this sketch has not ventured to include a detailed discussion of his views, perhaps mention may be made fitly of two points in which he was in advance of his contemporaries: he was among the very first to call attention to analogy as a force in the growth of language, and the first (after Latham in 1851) to doubt the then generally accepted view that Asia was the original home of the Indo-Europeans.

  His lectures on “Language and the Science of Language,” originally given before the popular audiences of the Smithsonian and Lowell Institutes, were published in 1867, and at once attracted the attention of the learned world, remaining to the present time an authoritative statement of the mission and methods of philological research. Somewhat discursive in treatment, they are supplemented by his later essays, particularly his chapter on the Science of Language in the article “Philology” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is of particular interest for its putting of his standpoint regarding the ultimate beginnings of human speech, which, according to Whitney, have their origin in man’s practical necessity for a means of communication, and not in any natural existence of names corresponding to certain conceptions.

  In the encyclopædias, Whitney is catalogued as a famous Indianist, and so indeed he was. But it was not because he was an Indianist that he was famous. Had he devoted his life to the physical or natural sciences, he would doubtless have attained to equal, if not greater eminence. Truly, it is not the what, but the how!… 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.”… Breadth and thoroughness are ever at war with each other in men, for that men are finite. The gift of both in large measure and at once,—this marks the man of genius. That the gift was Whitney’s is clear to any one who considers the versatility of his mind, the variousness of his work, and the quality of his results…. 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 problem of their sciences…. If I may cite my own words used on a former occasion, Whitney’s life-work shows three important lines of activity,—the elaboration of strictly technical works, the preparation of educational treatises, and the popular exposition of scientific questions.