Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/61



DO not understand that I am desired to provide a biographical sketch of Professor Whitney. That has been the grateful task for those who were in more constant and intimate connection with him. Neither am I asked to supply a critical review of his scholarly acquisitions and philological productions. That is a service to us which would require the technical knowledge of one of his favored pupils. I was not an intimate friend of Professor Whitney, nor was he my teacher. I seldom met him except at the spring and fall meetings of the American Oriental Society, where he was the one to whom all looked up as leader and master. He had been a member of this Society nearly twenty years before I became a member; but the meetings of these last twenty-five years, with the occasional call on him since his resignation, to discuss the interests of the Society, gave me some knowledge of, and admiration for, the man, although my own ignorance of the special branch of philology which he made his own leaves me incompetent to say what many of you could well say. It is only my own long connection with the American Oriental Society, and the sense of the obligation I am under to his personal kindness, that make me unwilling