the Hindus call it) of hard common-sense was often irresistible, and sometimes irresistibly funny. Witness this passage from his boyish journal: "On entering the river [the St. Mary's], we found ourselves in an archipelago of small islands, which stretches from the Sault down to the foot of the Georgian Bay. ─── says [that] ─── actually visited thirty-six thousand such islands, . . . which in my opinion is a whopper. To have done it, he must have stopped upon ten a day, every day for ten years." This may seem triviaL In fact, it is typical. It is in essence the same kind of treatment that he gave in later life to any loose statement or extravagant theory, although printed in the most dignified journal and propounded by the most redoubtable authority.
Breadth and thoroughness are ever at war with each other in men, for that men are finite. The gift of both in large measure and at once,—this marks the man of genius. That the gift was Whitney's is clear to any one who considers the versatility of his mind, the variousness of his work, and the quality of his results. As professor of Sanskrit, technical work in grammar, lexicography, text-criticism, and the like, lay nearest to him; but with all this, he still found strength to illuminate by his insight many questions of general linguistic theory, the origin of language, phonetics, the difficult subject of Hindu astronomy and the question of its derivation, the method and technique of translation, the science of religion, mythology, linguistic ethnology, alphabetics, and paleography, and much else. Astonishing is the combination of technical knowledge
