Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/63

Rh years his contributions composed half, and far the most important half, of the Society's publications. Indeed, we could almost say, and were glad to say, that the Society was William D. Whitney. It came with him to the Annual Meeting in Boston, and went back with him on his return. He put most distinctly his impress on the Society. He taught it the methods of critical philological science; and as an object lesson in that kind of research he presented his own work, and that of his pupils, in the study of Sanskrit. The Philological Association was later founded, inheriting the field of the classical section of the Oriental Society, and Professor Whitney was elected its first president in 1869. And his influence, coupled with that of Professors Goodwin and Hadley in the classical field, and of Professor March in Anglo-Saxon and Modern Languages, was of the most far-reaching importance in directing the activity and moulding the character of the young Association.

I suppose that what we may, without thereby identifying ourselves with either opposing camp of Materialists or Spiritualists, call the physical substratum of genius, its large and finely textured or convoluted brain, is given by Nature, and no study will make a great scholar out of one on whose endowment niggardly Nature has frowned. But Nature was in a gracious mood when she moulded the brain of the infant Whitney. Mr. Galton tells us that classic Greece bred men of genius more lavishly than has any other country at any time in the world's history. Some favored families have extraordinary endowments. The Whitney family was a remarkable one, although I need speak