as it was natural for one to feel who had swept such a wide range of comparative studies, was the reconstruction of a past national life, or of the processes of a long organic development, and the estimate of their part in the great competitive struggle of races and peoples and institutions, in which our present civilization and its complex problems have been evolved. This method was not formally taught in set phrase, nor was it soon perceived. Rather, it slowly dawned upon the pupil by participation in the mental processes of the teacher. Once having dawned, the vision never faded.
In spirit and in method, then, Professor Whitney was clearly Aristotelian rather than Platonic. He was never known to appeal to the emotions or the imagination. His influence discouraged such appeals. It was a natural result, therefore, that those pupils at least who did not come into more intimate and even confidential relations with him, felt that he was lacking somewhat on the side of esthetic literary discrimination. It is not improbable that the long protraction and rigid maintenance of the severely scientific side of his studies tended to produce in him, as in Darwin, more or less atrophy of certain senses which had at an earlier period been strong.
The example of Professor Whitney's career gave all his pupils a lofty ideal, and most of them a new ideal. The old ideal of an academic instructor in the classics was that of a genial man, of good literary form, who had acquired enough to teach what was required of him in a stimulating way, without much reference to anything beyond the formation of a good literary taste and
