To my neighbor, Miss Maria Whitney, I am indebted for the loan of the medallion from which the noble portrait of her brother, opposite page xliii, has been made. The medallion is a replica of the one in the Library of Yale University, and is a truthful likeness.
Of an occasional friendly turn from Professors Theobald Smith, George F. Moore, and Bloomfield, and from Dr. George A. Grierson, I have already made note (see pages 242, 756, 983, 243). Professors Bloomfield and Garbe allowed me to reproduce here a specimen leaf from their beautiful facsimile of the Kashmirian text. Professors Cappeller and Hopkins and Jacobi were so good as to criticize my Sanskrit verses.[1] In particular, I thank my colleague, Professor Morris H. Morgan, for his kindness in putting the dedication into stately Latin phrase.
It is with no small satisfaction that I make public mention of the admirable work of the Athenæum Press (situated in Cambridge) of Messrs. Ginn and Company of Boston. The Hindus sometimes liken human effort to one wheel of a cart. Fate, indeed, may be the other; but our destiny, they say, is not accomplished without both elements, just as there is no progress without both wheels. It is so with a book: good copy is one wheel; and a good printing-office is the other. Whitney's long experience was guarantee for the prior requisite; and the other I have not found lacking. The way has been a long one, with plenty of places for rough jolting and friction; but the uniform kindness and the alert and intelligent helpfulness of all with whom I have had to do at the Press have made our progress smooth, and I am sincerely grateful.
Human personality and the progress of science.—Had Whitney lived to see this work in print and to write the preface, his chief tribute of grateful acknowledgment would doubtless have been to his illustrious preceptor and colleague and friend whose toil had so largely increased its value, to Rudolph Roth of Tübingen. Whitney, who was my teacher, and Roth, who was my teacher's teacher and my own teacher, both are passed away, and Death has given the work to me to finish, or rather to bring nearer to an ideal and so unattainable completeness. They are beyond the reach of human thanks, of praise or blame: but I cannot help feeling that even in their life-time they understood that Science is concerned only with results, not with personalities, or (in Hindu phrase) that the Goddess of Learning, Sarasvatī or Vāc, cares not to ask even so much as the names of her votaries; and that the unending progress of Science is indeed like the endless flow of a river.
- ↑ These, I trust, will not be wholly unpleasing to my pundit-friends in India, who, as they will find the thought in part un-Indian, will not, I hope, forget that it was primarily and designedly conceived in Occidental form. Their great master, Daṇḍin, has a kind word for men in my case at the close of the first chapter of his Poetics.
