Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[468] a graduate school of philology, which very soon attracted able students, among them Charles R. Lanman, Irving Manatt, Bernadotte Perrin, A. H. Edgren, and William Rainey Harper, who well represent the variety of interests arising from the studies which Whitney directed. From 1850 Whitney had been a member of the American Oriental Society, and he became successively its corresponding secretary, its librarian, and its president. From 1857 to 1885 more than half of the Society's Journal came from his busy pen. He was also one of the founders and was the first president of the American Philological Association.

Whitney produced a large volume of work, and left his mark upon many different departments of scholarship. His important achievements in his particular field of Indology can be truly evaluated only by Indologists. His first large work in Indian scholarship was his edition, with Roth, of the Atharva-Veda-Sanhita; (1855-56), and his very last was the translation of the same Veda, edited after his death by Charles R. Lanman (1905). Whitney edited in 1862 the Atharva-Veda-Praticakhya with a translation and notes, and in 1871 the Taittiriya Prati-çākhya. ‘The Praticakhyas are the phonetico-grammatical treatises upon the texts of the Vedas, and are of prime importance for the establishment of the text. Their distinguishing feature is minutiae of marvellous exactness, but presented in such a form that no one with aught less than a tropical Oriental contempt for the value of time can make anything out of them as they stand. Whitney not only out-Hindus the Hindu for minutiae, but also, such is his command of form, actually recasts the whole so that it becomes a book of easy reference.’¹ These intensive studies of the Hindu grammarians and of the Sanskrit texts gave Whitney the material for his great Sanskrit Grammar (1879), with its supplement, The roots, verb-forms, and primary derivatives of the Sanskrit language (1885), which together form ‘the crowning achievement’ of his work as a Sanskrit scholar. Whitney's book goes behind the Hindu grammarians and rests upon direct induction from the texts. Beginning thus with the phenomena, Whitney might not be too severely condemned if, like Ticknor in the Spanish literature, he had failed to rise much above their merely factual level.