Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/70

56 moving in an ecliptic high above the level world of letters; and with gathering strength it comes to its flood. Such a force was Professor Agassiz, who was master to the whole school of young American biologists. We can never sufficiently recognize the debt we owe to that Swiss naturalist through whom we learned how to observe the facts of life and discover its laws. What Harvard did for the science of life in America through Agassiz, Yale did for Indo-European philology through Whitney. These men created epochs in our learned world,—such epochs as we have not since seen paralleled by any one man, and only by the establishment of Johns Hopkins University, with its grand provision for post-graduate instruction. These great epochs and epoch-making men and institutions we need to keep in mind in all their commanding grandeur if we will understand aright the history of learning.

Professor Whitney, who turned the tide of American philology so completely toward Indo-European studies, lived long enough to rejoice in the later renaissance of Semitic studies under the lead of his friend Hall, his pupil Harper, and Dr. Haupt, called to the head of the Semitic department at Johns Hopkins. Those of us who were interested in these studies he encouraged to earnest labor, and warned against hasty conclusions. To him all deferred as their wisest leader and friend. Who can follow him, with such creative abilities, such power of mind, such purity of soul, such simplicity of character, such scorn for the pretentious and the inexact, such breadth of learning, such balance of judgment, such modest strength?