Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/104

90

November 30, 1894.

,—I consider it a great honor to have been asked by the American Oriental Society to record my opinion of Professor Whitney's services, in the field of Indian Philology especially, and I will try to comply with their request.

It was first as a translator of Whitney's famous work on Language and its Study that I became fully acquainted with the depth and research of his writings, though indeed I had been using a great deal the Atharva-Veda as edited by Professors Roth and Whitney, "rothena ca hvitneyena ca çodhita," when I was reading the Veda with Professor Weber at Berlin as a student. The late lamented Professor Georg Curtius of Leipzig having directed my attention to the advisability of rendering Whitney's Language and its Study accessible to the general reader in Germany through the medium of a German translation and adaptation, I lost no time in undertaking that task, and derived much pleasure and profit from the close acquaintance which I formed, in the course of my labors, with the eminent work of Professor Whitney. While my translation was going through the press, he sent me several valuable contributions to my work, as well as the first volume of his delightful Oriental and Linguistic Studies, which I reviewed for a German scientific periodical. Among the many remarkable essays collected in that volume, which includes Whitney's attractive essay on the Vedic Doctrine of a Future Life and a number of valuable reviews and criticisms, the short but masterly essay on the Avesta has always appeared to me a specially striking instance of Whitney's rare skill in exhibiting in a condensed shape the salient features of an entire department of philological research. The first series of Whitney's Oriental and Linguistic Studies was speedily succeeded by the second, which is as rich in constructive essays as the first is in critical ones, and contains among other valuable papers Whitney's instructive and able remarks on the history of the Nakṣatras in India. Indian