William Hayes Ward

“ I suppose that what we may, without thereby identifying ourselves with either opposing camp of Materialists or Spiritualists, call the physical substratum of genius, its large and finely textured or convoluted brain, is given by Nature, and no study will make a great scholar out of one on whose endowment niggardly Nature has frowned. But Nature was in a gracious mood when she moulded the brain of the infant Whitney. ”

“ I do not ask others to shoot with his bow, but for a man who is to break paths, to be the engineer of our highway, no breadth of culture or extent of attainment can be useless; nothing less than the greatest is safe. Accordingly, we are not surprised that even in his own field of philology he had wider interests than those of the whole Indo-European family even; that in the beginning of his service at Yale College, he offered instruction in Egyptian as well as Sanskrit. ”

“ Nowadays we are in danger of making narrow men when we make learned men. Of all men a specialist needs to be a broad man; but how can he be a broad man if he devotes himself to his specialty early in his course of study? The profound scholar is not the one who will laugh at the scheme outlined by John Milton in his Letter to Master Hartlib on Education. Its wonderful breadth is the record of nothing more than what Milton himself did as a youth, in school and college and at Horton ”

“ We have observed the contrary dangers of a hasty man, fertile in suggestion, quick to enter new fields, publishing his undigested studies, often to the advantage of others and his own discredit; and the opposite error of a scholar so careful never to be wrong that he never tells the world anything. Mr. Whitney avoided both errors. ”

“ Such a force was Professor Agassiz, who was master to the whole school of young American biologists. We can never sufficiently recognize the debt we owe to that Swiss naturalist through whom we learned how to observe the facts of life and discover its laws. What Harvard did for the science of life in America through Agassiz, Yale did for Indo-European philology through Whitney. ”

“ Every one of the Sanskritists of this country,—and a great school it has been, if a young one,—Avery, Bloomfield, Buck, Edgren, Hopkins, Jackson, Lanman, Oertel, Perry, and a dozen others that deserve mention, may fairly claim to have been his pupils, either because they received his instructions in his lecture-room, or else because of the potent personal influence which he exerted upon their studies and work, albeit they had not belonged to that more favored circle. ”

“ Such a mind can afford to create for its acquirements the widest base, and to wait long before it takes extreme excursions in any single direction. Such a mind can profitably learn much of what the world knows on many diverse subjects before it selects one to be made a life's field of labor. ”

“ These men created epochs in our learned world,—such epochs as we have not since seen paralleled by any one man, and only by the establishment of Johns Hopkins University, with its grand provision for post-graduate instruction. ”

“ That universal breadth of training and that late coming into his kingdom is peculiarly important, not for the drudges, in the second and third rank, but for the master, in the first. The carpenter may begin early to hew to the line; but the architect or the engineer must spend many years over many things before he is master of his profession. ”