[…] etymologizing, or tracing the history of words toward their origin […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.18

On accuracy in etymological processes […] depends the success of the whole; and the perfecting of the methods of etymologizing is what especially distinguishes the new linguistic science from the old. The old worked upon the same basis on which the new now works: namely, on the tracing of resemblances or analogies between words, in regard to form and meaning. But the former was hopelessly superficial. It was guided by surface likenesses, without regard to the essential diversity which might underlie them […] it was heedless of the sources whence its material came; it did not, in short, command its subject sufficiently to have method.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.313