Excerpt from The Gaon, R. Elijah Wilna Address Delivered in Commemoration, of the Two Hundredth Anniversary, of His Birth R. Elijah Wilna., called the Gaon par excel lence, came of a family celebrated for the learn ing and piety of its members. Students of hered ity might find it highly interesting to study the stock from which the Gaon sprang and to as certain what it contributed to the extraordinary qualities of his soul and intellect. I shall refer to but one of his ancestors, Rabbi Moses ben David Ashkenazi, around whom a large cycle of legends arose that are told by Lithuanian Jews to this very day and were told to the young Eli jah as he in turn told them to his children. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.