Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/24

10 that, he found ample time to range the wooded hills of Berkshire, collecting birds, which he himself set up for the Natural History Society. The next three or four years were spent by him as clerk in the Northampton Bank, with accounts for his work, German and Swedish for his studies, ornithology and botany for his recreations, and music for his delight,—unless one should rather say that all was his delight. These oft-mentioned studies in natural history I should not linger over, save that their deep significance has hardly been adverted upon in public. They mean that, even at this early age, Whitney showed the stuff which distinguishes the genuine man of science from the jobbers and pedlers of learning. They mean that, with him, the gift of independent and accurate observation was inborn, and that the habit of unprejudiced reflection upon what he himself saw was easily acquired.

This brings us to a critical period in the determination of his career. In the encyclopedias, 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! That he did devote himself to Indology appears to be due to several facts which were in themselves and in their concomitance accidental. First, his elder brother, Josiah, now the distinguished professor of geology in Harvard University, on his return from Europe in 1847, had brought with him books in and on many languages, and among them a copy of the