new language and literature. His students never detected in him the specialist's natural partiality for that range of human endeavor which happens to be most in his thoughts. Rather, he slowly but surely, and almost always indirectly, brought a pupil to acknowledge to himself that a zeal born of ignorance had led him to indulge in a species of mental idolatry. But no iconoclasm followed the conviction. It was above all things a calmness and deliberateness of mental activity which was most fostered by contact with Professor Whitney's spirit,—a spirit which made him a dull controversialist, but a relentless opponent.
Professor Whitney's method was usually a revelation and an inspiration to his pupils. It was the method under which alone so comprehensive and masterful a mind as his, relatively unfired by imagination, must work, if it works at all, after the process of mere acquisition is complete,—the method of a Boeckh or a Darwin. It insisted upon the full accumulation of facts, and discouraged inference until inference could no more be deferred. Most of his pupils, before coming to him, had not risen above the idea of simple acquisition, and there was nothing organic even in their acquisition. It was agglutinative. Acquisition under his guidance had to be thorough and complete, and he shunned no dreariest monotony in enforcing it. But underneath the patience and serenity with which he sought to secure this with his pupils there lurked plainly, not exactly contempt for the mere acquisition or the process of acquisition, but the feeling that as means to an end it must not be suffered to eclipse the end. That end,
