Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/34

20 it a wicked sin to put time on such things, though playfully admitting the while that he had killed off with his own desperate copy I cannot remember how many luckless type-setters in the office of the Russian Academy.

Where there was so much of the best, it is not feasible to go into details about all. Yet I cannot omit mention of some of his masterpieces. Very notable is his "Language and the Study of Language,"—a work of wide currency, and one which has done more than any other in this country to promote sound and intelligent views upon the subjects concerned. It deals with principles, with speculative questions, and with broad generalizations,—the very things in which his mastery of material, self-restraint, even balance of mind, and rigorous logic come admirably into play.

Of a wholly different type, but not one whit inferior withal, are his Prātiçākhyas. These are the phoneticogrammatical treatises upon the text of the Vedas, and are of prime importance for the establishment of the text. Their distinguishing feature is minutiæ, of marvellous exactness, but presented in such a form that no one with aught less than a tropical Oriental contempt for the value of time can make anything out of them as they stand. Whitney not only out-Hindus the Hindu for minutiæ, but also—such is his command of form—actually recasts the whole, so that it becomes a book of easy reference.

As for the joint edition of the Atharva-Veda, it is a most noteworthy fact that it has held its own now for thirty-eight years as an unsurpassed model of what a