Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/95

Rh werden, Auf dieser Bewegung aber beruhen grossentheils die bedeutenden Fortschritte, die die indogermanische Sprachforschung seit den siebenziger Jahren unseres Jahrhunderts gemacht hat.


 * , 25. November 1894.

, December 16, 1894.

,—I sincerely sympathize with the idea of the American Orientalists to devote the next meeting of the Society to the memory of their late master and chief, Professor W. D. Whitney, whose recent death all European Sanskritists deeply deplore with their American colleagues. And I gladly accept your invitation to take part in this Çrāddha, this rite of reverence and devotion, by sending an expression of my high and sincere regard for Professor Whitney's most eminent services to our branch of learning.

Among the many great and excellent qualities distinguishing Professor Whitney, none strikes me so forcibly as his truly scientific turn of mind, which impelled him to strive for full clearness and scrupulous exactness in all his work and writings, and to combat fearlessly and with signal success all tendencies to surround difficult problems with a mystic veil of obscurity or to escape from them by a liberal employment of fine phrases.

To this same precious quality we owe Professor Whitney's admirable editions and translations of Sanskrit works, which are models of accuracy and true scholarship, and to this we owe his great reform of Sanskrit grammar, the most important that has been introduced since its study was taken up by European scholars. The conscientious and masterly manner