The New Queen of the Sciences and the New Republic

In the eighteenth century Christian higher education faced several new challenges. Most notable is the Enlightenment. American schools generally incorporated moderate Enlightenment ideas into their teaching, especially the new moral philosophy growing out of the tradition of John Locke and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. The religious dimensions of higher education were intensified by the Great Awakening and the associated New Light Movement. Yale College, founded in 1701, became by mid-century a leading New Light school. So was the College of New Jersey (Princeton), founded in 1746. A number of other new colleges had New Light connections. Thomas Clap at Yale, Jonathan Edwards, and Ezra Stiles each illustrate efforts to relate the new thought of the era to Christian teachings. The era of the American Revolution brought a new synthesis of Christian concerns and concerns for the right ordering of society, as best illustrated by the work of President John Witherspoon at Princeton.

William Dwight Whitney

The American Sanskritist and linguist William Dwight Whitney (b. 1827–d. 1894) was his country’s most important professional language scholar and linguistic theorist of the 19th century. Whitney grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, attended Williams College in that state, and for nearly three years did advanced study of “Oriental” languages in Germany at the universities of Berlin and Tübingen. In 1854 he began a long career at Yale College in Connecticut, teaching Sanskrit Language and Literature as well as modern languages, chiefly French and German. Whitney was a pillar of the American Oriental Society (established 1842), and a founder and the first president of the American Philological Association (established 1869). His research specialty was Indology: he was an expert in Sanskrit grammar. The focus of the present article, however, will be Whitney’s general linguistic thought, beginning with an overview of his ideas about language as a whole and about language prescriptivism. Then follows a description of the 18th-century sources of Whitney’s views, as well as of Whitney’s long debate with Friedrich Max Müller, who embodied all of the worst tendencies (as Whitney regarded them) of romanticist language theory. Responding to such tendencies made up a large portion of Whitney’s own theoretical output. Our discussion then considers Whitney’s legacy in three areas: (1) his influence on and critique of Neogrammarian doctrine, (2) the inspiration (both positive and negative) Whitney gave to Ferdinand de Saussure, and (3) the impetus he gave to aspects of 20th–21st-century sociolinguistic investigation, particularly by calling attention to the phenomenon of lexical diffusion. Whitney’s career as a language theorist began in 1864, with a lecture series on “The Principles of Linguistic Science” presented at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and, in an expanded version, at Boston’s Lowell Institute. These lectures became the basis of his book Language and the Study of Language (1867), a number of short pieces gathered and republished in Volume 1 of his Oriental and Linguistic Studies (1873), and his book The Life and Growth of Language (1875). All of these writings expressed Whitney’s quintessentially Anglo-American Common-Sense realist language philosophy. His 1867 and 1875 books were translated into the major European languages, the latter work being more successful in terms of the international attention it received and its impact, particularly on the German Neogrammarians, but also due to its long use as a linguistics textbook at institutions in the United States.

“GIANT BIRDS OF OLD”: AN 1837 POEM BY JAMES DWIGHT DANA (?) ON THE SUPPOSED MAKERS OF THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY'S FOSSIL TRACKWAYS

ABSTRACT An 1842 letter from Benjamin Silliman, Jr., to Edward Hitchcock contains the only known text of a poem that was reportedly composed five years earlier by an anonymous ‘tutor’ at Yale College. The poem's light-hearted verses depicted how the recently-described three-toed fossil footprints (now known to have been produced by theropod dinosaurs) were supposedly made by “giant birds of old”, as Hitchcock's recent investigation had concluded. The poem's lines offered a verbal ‘reconstruction’ of that ancient scene, along with suggesting the existence of two marsupial animals which may have borne witness to the passage of the trackmakers; one of which was plausible while the other was not. These ‘witnesses’ provide evidence that the poem's author was well informed upon contemporary geology and paleontology in a manner far beyond that of the common person. This article first reviews Hitchcock's inferences derived from the fossil evidence that the footprints had been made by multiple species of extinct birds, one of which attained enormous size, and the subsequent controversies regarding those claims that arose in America and Europe. Description by comparative anatomist Richard Owen of fossil bones of the much younger Moa or Dinornis from Recent strata in New Zealand seemingly vindicated Hitchcock's arguments and brought those disputes to a close. While the true identity of the poet remains inconclusive, internal evidence from the poem itself points to it having been composed by Yale graduate James Dwight Dana. His placement as an ‘assistant’ within the chemistry laboratory under Benjamin Silliman, Sr., at that time appears to support Silliman, Jr.'s assertion regarding the poet's identity. Probable reasons for the apparent suppression of the poem's existence and its authorship are likewise explored. The former was finally eased after Dana's return from the U.S. Exploring Expedition in 1842, but the latter was not.