A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

William Dwight Whitney.—Probably William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) is best known as a writer of textbooks and popular expositor of linguistic problems. Among scholars, however, his chief monument is his work in Sanskrit. Born at Northampton, Massachusetts, he was graduated at eighteen from Williams College. In the winter of 1848–1849 he began the study of Sanskrit; this study he continued under Salisbury at Yale, Weber at Berlin, and Roth at Tübingen. In 1854 he was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Yale, and held this chair until his death; being for many years accounted the leading philologist in America. He was a most industrious and systematic worker. His bibliography includes 360 titles. He wrote simple and lucid grammars of English (1877), French (1886), German (1869), and Sanskrit (1879); “Language and the Study of Language” (1867); “Oriental and Linguistic Studies” (1873–1874); “The Life and Growth of Language” (1875); several translations, with commentaries, of Sanskrit texts; and numerous papers and reviews. He was also editor-in-chief of “The Century Dictionary” (1889–1891) and read every proof of its 21,138 columns. But his greatest service to the cause of science was in holding up to his pupils a lofty ideal and a rigorous scientific method.

Hellenists, Latinists, and linguists of every sort [said Professor Perrin in a memorial address], and even historical students in the more restricted sense, all over this country and Europe, are now labouring, each in his chosen field, with a more equable spirit, a broader method, and a loftier ideal, because they have caught them all, directly or indirectly, from the master whose memory we honour.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve.—Valuable work in classical philology has been done by Basil L. Gildersleeve (born in 1831). After graduating at Princeton in 1849, he studied at Berlin, Bonn, and Göttingen, receiving the degree of Ph.D. from Göttingen in 1853. For twenty years (1856–1876) he was professor of Greek (for five years, of Latin also) at the University of Virginia. In 1876 he was called to a similar chair at Johns Hopkins University, which he has since held. He founded (1880) and has since edited The American Journal of Philology, and has published, among other books, “A Latin Grammar” (1876, twice revised), “Essays and Studies, Educational and Literary” (1890), “The Syntax of Classical Greek” (part i., 1900, with Charles W. E. Miller), and editions of Justin Martyr, Persius, and Pindar.

Natural and Physical Science.—It is in the natural and physical sciences that our attempt to cover the ground will at once appear most hopeless. In some of these sciences, for example astronomy, physics, and geology, American scholars stand concededly among the foremost in the world; to practically all of them Americans have contributed noteworthy studies and discoveries. Lack of space prevents even the mention, with one or two exceptions, of living writers.

John James Audubon.—Among the naturalists of America no name is more illustrious than that of the chief of our ornithologists, John James Audubon (1780–1851). His father was a French naval officer who had settled upon a plantation near New Orleans and married a lady of Spanish descent. When but a child Audubon used to draw pictures of birds; of those which were not satisfactory he made a bonfire at each birthday. When he was about eighteen, his father settled him on a farm near Philadelphia; here he gratified the naturalist’s passion to such an extent that he was good for nothing else. “For a period of twenty years,” he wrote later, “my life was a series of vicissitudes. I tried various branches of commerce, but they all proved unprofitable, doubtless because my whole mind was ever filled with my passion for rambling and admiring those objects of Nature from which alone I received the purest gratification.” He lived with his family successively in Kentucky, Ohio, Mississippi, and Louisiana; drawing and studying birds incessantly. Visiting England in 1826, he arranged for the publication of “The Birds of America” (1830–1839). It was to be published in numbers of five folio plates each, the whole to be in four volumes and to be sold for $1000 a copy. The work was to cost over $100,000; yet he had not money enough to pay for the first number. He supported himself by painting. He was elected (1830) a Fellow of the Royal Society. Audubon accompanied his “Birds” with “Ornithological Biographies” (five volumes, 1831–1839), the literary value of which is important; “it presents,” says one writer, “in language warm from his having been a part of the scenes, a virgin past of our country, and its forests and prairies, which can never be restored or so well described again.” “The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,” with 150 plates, appeared in three volumes in 1845–1848; in this undertaking he was assisted by his two sons and the Rev. John Bachman of Charleston, South Carolina. The last three years of his life were spent in mental darkness. His claim to honorable rank in American letters cannot be denied.

Spencer Fullerton Baird.—No American naturalist exerted a wider and deeper influence than Spencer F. Baird (1823–1887). A native of Pennsylvania and a graduate of Dickinson College (1840), he was the friend and in some work the collaborator of Audubon, Agassiz, and other zoölogists. Appointed assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1850, he directed much of the scientific exploration of the West; organised the National Museum (1857); succeeded Henry in 1878 as secretary of the Smithsonian and largely developed its work; and in 1874 became head of the Commission of Fish and Fisheries, and organised the science and practice of fish culture in America. He was besides a voluminous writer. His books and papers down to 1882 include 1063 titles. Of them we may mention “Catalogue of North American Reptiles” (1853), “The Birds of America” (with John Cassin, 1860), “The Mammals of North America” (1859), and “History of American Birds” (with Thomas M. Brewer and Robert Ridgway, 1874–1884).

Alpheus Hyatt.—In zoölogy and palæontology one of the celebrated scholars of his day was Alpheus Hyatt (1838–1902). Born in Washington, D. C., he received his education at the Maryland Military Academy, Yale College, and under Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1862. After the Civil War, in which he rose to be a captain, he continued his studies in natural history and became active in fostering these studies in general. He helped to found The American Naturalist in 1868, and was the principal founder of the American Society of Naturalists, organised in 1883. In 1881 he became professor of zoölogy and palæontology in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in Boston University. He was equally active in teaching, in popularising science, and in research. Some of his books are “Observations on Freshwater Polyzoa” (1866), “Revision of North American Poriferæ” (1875–1877), long the only work on North American commercial sponges, “The Genesis of the Tertiary Species of Planorbis at Steinheim,” a long and important monograph on the influence of gravity on certain shells, published by the Boston Society of Natural History in its “Memoirs” (1880), “Genera of Fossil Cephalopods” (1883), “The Larval Theory of the Origin of Cellular Tissue” (1884), giving his theory of the origin of sex, and “The Genesis of the Arietidæ” (1889). He also edited a series of “Guides for Science-Teaching,” of several of which he himself was also the author. Few Americans indeed have done so much to make natural science popular as did Hyatt. His work in research was immensely fruitful. He has been called the founder of the new school of invertebrate palæontology, while in systematic zoölogy he made several discoveries which led to important revisions in biological classification.

Alpheus Spring Packard.—The son of a Bowdoin College professor of the same name, Alpheus S. Packard (1839–1905) naturally entered Bowdoin and there came under the influence of Dr. Paul Chadbourne, who encouraged his inclination toward zoölogical study. After graduating from Bowdoin in 1861 and from the Maine Medical School in 1864, he worked under Agassiz at Harvard, devoting himself largely to the study of insects. In 1867 he became curator of invertebrates and in 1876 director, of the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1878 he was appointed professor of zoölogy and geology in Brown University, retaining this post till his death. He was one of the founders and for twenty years editor of The American Naturalist. Besides hundreds of papers, he wrote a “Guide to the Study of Insects” (1869); “The Mammoth Cave and Its Inhabitants,” jointly with F. W. Putnam (1872); “Life Histories of Animals” (1876), the first attempt since the Lowell Institute lectures of Agassiz to attempt a summary of embryological discoveries; “Insects Injurious to Forest and Shade Trees” (1890), “A Naturalist on the Labrador Coast” (1891), “A Text-Book of Entomology” (1898), and “Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work” (1901). Apropos of the last book it will be remembered that Packard, Cope, and Hyatt were the founders and chief exponents of the Neo-Lamarckian school of evolution. Packard was an indefatigable investigator and his contributions to entomology and zoölogy immensely advanced those sciences.

Edward Drinker Cope.—Another celebrated naturalist was Edward D. Cope (1840–1897) of Philadelphia, whose studies in fossil vertebrates were of epoch-making significance. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1864 till 1867 he was professor of natural sciences in Haverford College. For twenty-two years thereafter he was engaged in exploration, research, and editorial work. In 1889 he became professor of geology and palæontology in the University of Pennsylvania. Before he was thirty he had laid his foundations in five chief lines of research, ichthyology, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and evolutionary philosophy. On all of these subjects he wrote much and wisely. He was the author of over four hundred volumes, papers, and memoirs, to say nothing of hundreds of editorial articles in The American Naturalist, which he edited from 1878 until his death. On the subject of evolution alone his most important works are “The Origin of Genera” (1868), “The Origin of the Fittest” (1886), and “The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution” (1896). His activity in research may be judged from the fact that he himself named and described 1115 out of some 3200 known species of North American fossil vertebrates. Naturally, in attempting so much, he fell short of perfection in some things.