response to maternal tenderness is often attributed to idiocy or stupidity. It is not the speaking, but the hearing organ that is at fault. The harmonious waves of that involuntary teaching—the human voice-have broken without significance upon the ear, and the moving lips have conveyed no idea to the mind.

The great problem is to establish some common medium of communication by which a teacher may approach such a mind. As the ear is closed, the eye becomes the most inviting avenue for this entrance, and natural signs, such as laughing, weeping, motions of the hands, suggest the possible way of reaching the sepulchred thoughts and calling them into active exercise. By a hand alphabet words may be easily learned; but then comes the more serious problem of connecting these words with their appropriate ideas. The deaf have two different languages to learn under the most unfavorable circumstances--the language of signs as expressing ideas, and then the language of words as expressing the same ideas. As they do not hear the latter spoken, as only the nouns, or names of natural objects, can be readily represented to the eye, it can be easily seen how wearisome and difficult the work must be to lead such a chained mind along so mysterious a path, and how slowly and carefully it must be pursued to keep the idea and the sign or word permanently associated together. We can also easily see how valueless the acquiring of a knowledge of words would be, when, having simply learned the alphabet of a foreign tongue, we take up a volume and read a page of it. We may have read the words correctly, but not an idea have we received from them.

When Abbé de l'Epée, of Paris, (to whom, perhaps, deaf mutes owe more than to any other person,) whose interest and untiring zeal had been awakened in behalf of these silent sufferers by a call upon two sisters, whose lack of response to his address he could not at first comprehend, and whose great misfortune, when he discovered it, made an ineffaceable impression upon his heart, after meditating long upon the subject, grasped by a sudden inspiration the thought that all language was simply signs of ideas, that gestures were also signs of ideas, and that there might be a language of gestures as well as of arbitrary words, he at once hastened, with devout enthusiasm, to execute his plan growing out of this conception. His suc

cess in the years following 1755 became the marvel of Europe. With his first pupils he gathered others, all of them of the poorest class, even refusing the children of wealth though pressed upon him with large pecuniary offers, esteeming the former to be greater sufferers from their loss of this important sense than the children of the rich. He soon by signs made them familiar with their written native language, and enabled them to transcribe whole pages of the most abstract disquisitions by the intermedium of gestures; but these gestures, which they had mechanically associated with certain characters, conveyed to them no notion of the real signification of those characters; for, as in every language words are but conventional signs, it is clear that, before their meaning could have been agreed upon, there must have existed some prior language mutually understood by the parties making the agreement,* such language as hieroglyphics, for instance. The great and fatal deficiency in the system of De l'Epée was soon seen. A school had been established by Abbé Storck, according to this method, in Vienna, and, at a public exhibition, questions were asked by signs, and readily answered by the pupils in written words upon the blackboard. Mr. Nicolai, an academician of Berlin, who was present, proposed that the pupils should describe in writing the meaning of a significant act which he would perform. His request was granted. Mr. Nicolai then struck his breast with his hand, and the deaf and dumb boy simply wrote upon the board the words, hand, breast, † showing that neither the sign nor the words conveyed to him an idea, only as far as he had been taught that a certain gesture stood for a certain word, and both expressed a certain thing. Out of this very limited vocabulary he was utterly in the dark. Abbé de l'Epée's system provided a separate sign for every word used. He held that there was no more necessary or natural connection between an idea and an articulate sound striking the ear, than between the same idea, properly expressed by a natural sign, striking upon the eye; but while he found many signs almost instinctively embodying the wants and simple conceptions of deaf children, in his attempt to make a sign language entirely equivalent to ordinary speech, he overlooked, in too * Encyclopædia Britannica.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Art., Deaf and Dumb.

large a measure, the mental condition of his pupils in reference to the paucity of their ideas; and while he had no difficulty in showing them that a certain easily remembered sign stood for a word which they could read in a book or write upon the board, he was sometimes only developing their habits of attention and memory, not. their thoughts. This often occurs with speaking pupils, when lessons are only verbally learned, without a clear conception of their meaning; his pupils had often no true mental picture of what is signified by both word and sign, but were mere parrots, rather than intelligent, educated scholars.

His eminent associate, successor, and intellectual superior, Abbé Sicard, saw this deficiency, and by simplifying and improving the sign language, and especially by rendering it the vernacular language of the mute, in which he should conduct his thinking, and afterward translate his sign speech into handspelling or written language, he secured a more positive and broader mental culture, and gradually led his pupils into the intellectual appreciation of the written literature of their native, and even foreign tongues, and to a rapid and satisfactory moral and religious development. Improvements have constantly been made upon this "natural method," as it is called, by the successors of these benevolent and devoted Catholic priests, down to the present Director of the great Paris Institution for Deaf Mutes, the distinguished Professor Leon Vaisse, who enjoys a high reputation as an original and successful teacher in Europe and America.

But particularly in our country has this system for the training of this unfortunate class been brought to a gratifying perfection. In 1815 several gentlemen of Hartford, influenced by their sympathy for a very interesting daughter of one of their number, an eminent physician, Miss Alice Cogswell, whose intellectual and moral development afterward, alone, was an ample compensation for their zeal and pecuniary sacrifices, sent to Europe a young clergyman whose name has since gained a world-wide reputation-Rev. T. H. Gallaudet-to qualify himself to become a teacher of deaf mutes. Meeting with an illiberal reception in England, he passed over to France, and found a warm welcome at the hand of Abbé Sicard. He enjoyed his instructions for three months, and then returned to this country, bringing with him M. Laurent Clerc, who still

survives, an educated deaf mute, and one of the favorite pupils of Sicard.

In 1817 the first Deaf and Dumb Asylum in this country, ultimately deservedly bearing (as for a long period it stood alone, and received a small national endowment) the title of the American Asylum, was opened at Hartford. A succession of very able principals and professors, many of the latter becoming the heads of institutions afterward established in different States, all of which, with two or three late exceptions, have accepted the same general system of instruction, has secured for it a careful and high elaboration, a very wide development, and made it to stand forth as a leading and representative school of training for the instruction of this large and interesting class of persons.

Particularly has this system of natural signs been brought to a remarkable degree of efficiency in the hands of the eminent and now truly venerable Dr. Peet, of the New York Institution, (for a half century an instructor of the deaf, an original investigator and writer upon the theme, to whom our country owes a large debt of respect for his unflagging devotion to his work,) and his cultivated sons, especially Professor Isaac Lewis Peet, the present principal of this large and deservedly popular institution. Under the supervision of the latter, the work of simplifying the language of signs, and bringing it under the most natural and philosophical laws of obviating the evil intellectual tendencies of such a language called "Deaf Muteism "-of securing more clearly the development of positive ideas, and leading the mind more rapidly to the understanding of the language of the land of its nativity and its grammatical structure-is constantly going on.

The relation of the sign-language to a spoken or written language, and its peculiar idiom, will be seen in the answer of Professor Keep, of Hartford, to the following question propounded by G. G. Hubbard, Esq., of Cambridge, Mass.: "Can you give me a few signs, with their translation into English, and also a short sentence in English, with its translation into the idiom of the sign-language?" To this the Professor returns the following answer:

I could describe to you the mode of making certain signs and explain their meaning, but I cannot write their ideas graphically,. so as to exhibit them in a connected or sentence form.. And in FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXII.-27

attempting to translate an English sentence into signs, it must be always borne in mind that the English words employed to represent signs, whatever be their form, are not designed to express cases or tenses or moods. By the use of words we are able to give some idea of the order of the signs, and this is all. Mr. Turner has kindly handed me the story you sent him. I will first give a Latin version of it, and then show you what would be the order of signs, as well as I can present the same. From similarity in the arrangement and order of thoughts in the two languages, I trust you will see that one is no more a confused jargon than the other.

"A bear killed my father's geese; this made him mad. He shouldered his gun and went to look for the bear. When he discovered it he took a good position, fired, and killed the bear. The family were all very glad."

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Ursus patris anseres mei interfecit. Id eum iratum fecit. Sclopetum humero acclinavit et ivit ut ursum quæreret. Quum eum inveniret, loco bono occupato, telum misit et ursum occidit. Familia omnis erat lætissima."

In beginning the sign-version we make the sign for past time. Then, since signs require that the mode of killing should be true to nature and fact, we say "catch and eat" instead of kill. The story as rendered in signs will be: Bear, geese, father my his catch eat. Father angry very. Gun shoulder on, go look for bear. Discover. Place good stand. Fire. Bear die. Father, mother, children, all glad very.

To the question "What proportion of the exact ideas or words of a spoken sermon are actually translated into the sign language?" Professor Keep answered, "All the ideas; none of the words." And to the natural question, "How much of such a discourse is lost by the deaf mute hearers?" he responds: "Through inattention, preoccupation, or incapacity, as large a proportion may be lost by those who look upon the signs as by those who hear the voice."

Of the success of this vernacular of signs, as a means to introduce the more intelligent of this class of persons to a liberal culture in their own native literature and in other tongues, there are the most satisfactory evidences. In the high class in all the American institutions, good progress in advanced mathematics, metaphysics, the natural sciences, and the classics, gives annual assurance of this. The successful inauguration of a Collegiate Institution for the Deaf and Dumb at Washington, with a full curriculum of studies, the pupils having been "fitted" in State asylums, or in the preparatory school conducted on the same