Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/43



UR great Sanskrit scholar was also an instructor in modern languages at Yale during almost all of his active life. He taught great classes of undergraduates French and German for thirty years. He daily gave them his morning hour. He prepared a German grammar, a French grammar, a German reader with notes and vocabulary, a German dictionary, and also an English grammar, all for practical use in schools and colleges. These books are believed to be the most widely used of their kind, and are everywhere prized by superior teachers.

All are remarkable books. Professor Whitney was an exact observer, but he was by eminence a systematizer. He had a profound system of language, its origin, its essential elements, its development, its differentiation into families of languages, and in the Indo-European family the differentiation of the languages. A linguistic phenomenon was no fact to him till he saw it in its historic development; a fact was no truth to