Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/68

54 scholar so careful never to be wrong that he never tells the world anything. Mr. Whitney avoided both errors. Who was more careful than he? And how large and numerous are his published writings!

On one other point in Professor Whitney's character I wish briefly to speak; I mean his transparent simplicity. Naturalness may be treated as a negative quality, the absence of show and pretence; but it is a positive quality, nevertheless, just as the whiteness of light is something more than the absence of color. I suppose that simplicity, unconsciousness, is the mark of a great scholar anywhere, and that every great college can boast of men as simple as they have been great. But it seems to me that Yale College has been fortunate in having had, during the last forty years, three men singularly great in special scholarship, yet all very wide in their attainments, and all notably simple and unaffected. I mean President Woolsey, Professor Hadley, and Professor Whitney. It is a great thing for the traditions of a college, for the influence exerted on its successive classes of students, to have such men as their models, as the objects of their admiration. No one could meet Professor Whitney without observing the beauty of his simple Doric strength, which allowed no acanthus decorations to solicit the notice of observers.

Perhaps we may best appreciate what we owe to Professor Whitney, if we try to imagine our American scholarship deprived of all that came through him. I do not deny that it might have come through others, in time; but through him it did come, and through others it would have come later. His special impulse was