674 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 357. 



is a precious heirloom handed down from 

 the Yale of the last century to the Yale of 

 the present. He was an orator, a poet, a 

 lover of nature, and of man — fearless, 

 original, persuasive, too liberal for the con- 

 servatives, too conservative for the liberals 

 of that day, now honored in both their 

 schools. Horace Bushnell is the greatest of 

 this group. Indeed I should place him, in 

 genius, next to Jonathan Edwards. 



Not a few of our brethren have excelled 

 in historical writing. Stiles wrote a history 

 of the exiled Judges, and Benjamin Trum- 

 bull the history of Connecticut ; Samuel 

 Farmer Jarvis was designated historiog- 

 rapher of the Episcopal Church ; Moses 

 Coit Tyler is the historian of American 

 literature ; Andrew D. White is the de- 

 fender of science versus bigotry, whose his- 

 tory should make us grateful that Yale has 

 been one of the most important American 

 agencies for the emancipation of the human 

 intellect from ignorance and dogmatism ; 

 Charles L. Brice is the exponent of Gesta 

 Christi ; George P. Fisher, an honored 

 member of the faculty for almost fifty 

 years, stands in the foremost rank among 

 the ecclesiastical historians of this country, 

 and Leonard Bacon, the Puritan, always 

 remarkable for clearness and vigor, whether 

 religion or politics was his theme, is the 

 author of discourses on the early days of 

 New Haven, which remain unsurpassed in 

 the field of local history. He was like a 

 modern Isaiah, the trenchant defender of 

 political righteousness. Stille's pamphlet, 

 ' How a Free People conduct a Long War,' 

 was one of the most inspiring products of 

 the uprising for the Union ; and^Schuyler's 

 studies in Turkistan and his essays in di- 

 plomacy are enduring memorials^of another 

 'all roiind man,' observer, critic, traveler, 

 essayist, historian, diplomatist — good in 

 whatever he undertook. 



Comparative philology was introduced 

 among us by Josiah W. Gibbs, but the 



chief impulse in this direction came from 

 Salisbury, the first to teach Sanskrit in 

 America. He recognized the ability and 

 secured the services of one who was not a 

 graduate, it is true, but an adopted son, 

 whose honors are our honors, whose fame 

 carries the name of Yale to every university 

 of the Indo-European world, that illustrious 

 scholar, William J). Whitney. We must 

 remember that James Murdock in 1851 

 published a translation of the Peshito Syriac 

 version of the New Testament ; that Moses 

 Stuart at an earlier day carried from New 

 Haven to Andover, an enthusiastic, if not 

 always accurate, devotion to Biblical litera- 

 ture ; and that a learned and 'devoted 

 scholar, Eli Smith, within sight of Mt. 

 Lebanon, translated nearly all the Bible 

 into Arabic, as in later days Hiram Bing- 

 ham translated it into one of the languages 

 of the Pacific Ocean. 



Another interesting phase of philological 

 study is shown in the attention given to the 

 study of the languages of the North Amer- 

 ican Indians. This began very early, when 

 Sargent, Brainard, Spencer and Edwards 

 were engaged as missionaries to the abo- 

 rigines in Western Massachusetts and in 

 Central New York. The philological im- 

 portance of the American speech was recog- 

 nized in recent days by James Hammond 

 Trumbull, who with rare aptitudes for the 

 elucidation of knotty problems, directed his 

 attention to the Indian languages of the 

 Eastern States, and was soon acknowledged 

 as foremost in that uninviting and perplex- 

 ing field of inquiry. Before long we shall 

 have his lexicon of the Natick Speech, so 

 that he who will may cultivate the love of 

 comparative literature by reading Eliot's 

 Indian Bible. Daniel G. Brinton in other 

 branches of aboriginal research has also won 

 renown. 



An unusual manifestation of the love of 

 letters is shown by the attention given dur- 

 ing the last century to lexicography. For 



