Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/35

Rh Vedic text-edition ought to be. His "Index Verborum to the Atharva-Veda," a work of wonderful completeness and accuracy, is much more than its name implies, and may not pass without brief mention, inasmuch as its material formed the basis of his contributions to the Sanskrit-German lexicon published by the Imperial Academy of Russia. This great seven-volumed quarto, whose steady progress through the press took some three and twenty years, is the Sanskrit Stephanus. Americans may well be proud of the fact that to Whitney belongs the distinguished honor of being one of the four "faithful collaborators" who, next to the authors, Boehtlingk and Roth, contributed most to this monumental work.

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 problems of their sciences. The language is treated historically, and as the product of life and growth; and the work is filled with the results of scores of minute and far-reaching special investigations. The amount of material which is here subjected to rigorous and original methods of classification and scientific induction is enormous; and none but those who were familiar with his writing-table can well realize the self-restraint that he used in order to bring his results into moderate compass.