[…] the science of language is only in the most recent period taking shape, and its principles are still subjects of great diversity of opinion and of lively controversy.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.316

[…] the science of language is to be regarded as a modern one, as much so as geology and chemistry; it belongs, like them, to the nineteenth century.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.4-5

[…] the science of language seeks after causes, endeavors to explain the facts of language […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.16

[…] the science of language, or linguistic science. That science strives to comprehend language, both in its unity, as a means of human expression and as distinguished from brute communication, and in its internal variety, of material and structure. It seeks to discover the cause of the resemblances and differences of languages, and to effect a classification of them, by tracing out the lines of resemblance, and drawing the limits of difference. It seeks to determine what language is in relation to thought, and how it came to sustain this relation; what keeps up its life and what has kept it in existence in past time, and even, if possible, how it came into existence at all. It seeks to know what language is worth to the mind, and what has been its part in the development of our race. And, less directly, it seeks to learn and set forth what it may of the history of human development, and of the history of races, their movements and connections, so far as these are to be read in the facts of language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.4

[…] the study of Indo-European language has been the training-ground of the science of language […] the two have almost grown up together, and in the minds of some have even perhaps been confused and identified with one another.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.189

Although of so recent growth, the science of language is already one of the leading branches of modern inquiry.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.5

The science of language is what its name implies, a study of all human speech, of every existing and recorded dialect, without rejection of any, for obscurity, for remoteness, for lowness of development
- Whitney (1875), a pag.191

The science of language runs out, on its comparative side, into an infinity of details, like chemistry or zoology, and one may be extremely well versed in the manipulation of its special processes while wholly wrong as regards its grander generalizations […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.316