[…] with all the mental capacities involved in language, the psychic forces which underlie that practical faculty, and which, being by it brought to conscious action, are drawn out and trained and developed.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.303

If language itself were a gift, a faculty, a capacity, it might admit of being regarded as the subject of direct bestowal; being only a result, a historical result, to assert that it sprang into developed being along with man is to assert a miracle […] That view of the nature of language which linguistic science establishes takes entirely away the foundation on which the doctrine of divine origin, in its form as once held, reposed.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.302-303

Language is one of the most marked and conspicuous, as well as fundamentally characteristic, of the faculties of man.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.3