Whitney, JOSIAH DWIGHT, geologist, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, 23d November 1819, graduated at Yale in 1839, and the year after joined the survey of New Hampshire. The years 1842-47 he spent in study in Europe, returning to explore, together with J. W. Foster, the Lake Superior region. Their Synopsis of the explorations was published in 1849; their Report on the geology, 1850-51. Whitney next spent two years travelling in the states east of the Mississippi, of which the fruit was The Metallic Wealth of the United States (1854). Appointed state chemist and professor in the Iowa state university in 1855, together with James Hall, he issued the Reports on its geological survey (1858-59); and in 1858-60 took part in the survey of the lead region of the upper Missouri, publishing, again with Hall, his Report (1862). He was appointed state geologist of California in 1860, and laboured on the survey of that state till 1874, publishing in six volumes his Geological Survey of California (1864-70). In 1865 he was appointed to the chair of Geology at Harvard, received the LL.D. degree from Yale in 1870, and had the honour of giving his name to the highest mountain in the United States. His Yosemite Guidebook was published in 1869. He died in August 1896.—His brother, WILLIAM DWIGHT WHITNEY, philologist, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, 9th February 1827, graduated at Williams in 1845, and was three years thereafter clerk in a bank, studying Sanskrit the while. In 1849-50 he studied at Yale, then went to Germany, studying at Berlin under Bopp and Weber, and at Tübingen under Roth, with whom he prepared an edition of the Atharva Veda Samhita (Berlin, 1856). In 1854 he was appointed professor of Sanskrit at Yale, in 1870 also of Comparative Philology. He received the degrees of Ph.D. from Breslau (1861), LL.D. from Williams (1868), Harvard (1876), St
Andrews (1874), Edinburgh (1892), and Litt.D. from Columbia (1886). A member of the American Oriental Society from 1849, he was its librarian (1855-73), its corresponding secretary (1857-84), and then its president. His contributions to the Journal of the society were no less numerous than important, including a translation of the Sūrya Sūddhānta (1860); text with notes of the Atharva Veda Prātiçākhya (1862); the text with notes of the Taittirīya Prātiçākhya (1871), which was awarded the Bopp prize by the Berlin Academy as the most important Sanskrit publication of the preceding three years; and the Index Verborum to the Atharva Veda (1881). He contributed also to the great Sanskrit dictionary of Böhtlingk and Roth (7 vols. St Petersburg, 1853-67). He died 17th June 1894. Professor Whitney was undoubtedly one of the foremost Sanskrit scholars of the day, and was a correspondent of the Berlin, Turin, Rome, and St Petersburg academies, the Institute of France, and a foreign knight of the Prussian order 'Pour le Mérite.' As a scientific philologist he belonged to the school that ascribes the development of speech to the acceptance of conventional signs, its origin imitative rather than an intuitive concomitant of thought. He waged warfare with Max-Müller on fundamental questions of the science of language, and those interested in such controversies will find the European scholar's onslaught on Whitney at length in the fourth volume of his Chips from a German Workshop (1875).
Other works of Whitney's are On Material and Form in Language (1872); Darwinism and Language (1874); Logical Consistency in Views of Language (1880); Mixture in Language (1881); compendious German Grammar (1869), Reader (1870), and Dictionary (1877); Oriental and Linguistic Studies (1873-75); Life and Growth of Language, in International Science Series (1876); Essentials of English Grammar (1877); Sanskrit Grammar (1879); Practical French Grammar (1886). He was also editor-in-chief of the great Century Dictionary (6 vols. New York, 1889-91).