Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/67

Rh in the studies of natural science. I do not ask others to shoot with his bow, but for a man who is to break paths, to be the engineer of our highway, no breadth of culture or extent of attainment can be useless; nothing less than the greatest is safe. Accordingly, we are not surprised that even in his own field of philology he had wider interests than those of the whole Indo-European family even; that in the beginning of his service at Yale College, he offered instruction in Egyptian as well as Sanskrit.

May I not perhaps connect with this same breadth of training the remarkable exactness of his knowledge and the soundness of his judgment? He had a contempt for uncertainty where certainty was attainable, and perhaps a greater contempt for certainty where it was unattainable. He demanded the exact facts, as they were observed and measured and counted. For hasty conclusions and generalizations he had no patience. If he was ever lacking in suavity, it was toward the sounding pronouncements and brilliant charlatanisms of a really able scholar. His keen mind took in all the facts and sought out their philosophy, and was not to be misled by eloquent sophistry to accept conjecture for ascertained truth. He was our soundest teacher on the philosophy of language. At the same time, while thus careful, he was not slow, neither did he allow any finical nicety to prevent him from being a prolific author. We have observed the contrary dangers of a hasty man, fertile in suggestion, quick to enter new fields, publishing his undigested studies, often to the advantage of others and his own discredit; and the opposite error of a