CHAPTER XVII.

Natural Defects overcome: Demosthenes; De Beaumont; Navarete; Saunderson; Rugendas; Diodotus; Didymus; Eusebius; Nicaise; De Pagan; Galileo; Euler; Moyes.

STILL more depressing than any of those deprivations which we have yet considered, are such natural inflictions as close up altogether some one or more of the ordinary avenues by which knowledge finds its way into the mind; and thus seem to oppose an almost insurmountable obstacle to the pursuit, perhaps, of the very studies in which the intellectual powers, thus cramped or darkened, might otherwise have been best fitted to excel. Several instances might be mentioned, in which individuals, strongly attached to a particular path of ambition, have, by mere perseverance, entirely overcome the slighter impediments presented by physical malconformation. Thus, for example, DEMOSTHENES strengthened a weak voice, and cured his natural indistinctness of articulation, by exercising himself in declamation while ascending the brow of a hill, or walking amid the noise of the waves along the sea-shore. Others have contrived to prosecute certain professional employments with distinguished success, under disadvantages of this sort, which no discipline could cure. The French advocate, ELIE DE BEAUMONT, after having been educated for the bar, found his voice so weak, as completely to prevent his making any figure as a speaker; but by devoting himself to the writing of memorials for his clients, he soon established for himself the most brilliant reputation as a master both of law and of eloquence. The celebrated Spanish

painter, FERNANDEZ NAVARETE, was seized with an illness, when only two years old, which left him deaf and dumb for life. Yet in this state he displayed from his infancy the strongest passion for drawing, covering the walls of the apartments with pictures of all sorts of objects, done with charcoal; and having afterwards studied under Titian, he became eventually one of the greatest artists of his age. Navarete, who flourished in the sixteenth century, could both read and write, and even possessed considerable learning.

Blindness, however, is the calamity that seems most effectually to shut the mind up from the acquisition of knowledge. Yet we have many examples of the attainment of distinguished eminence in intellectual pursuits, under this severe deprivation. Of these we shall now proceed to lay a few of the more remarkable before our readers.

NICHOLAS SAUNDERSON was born at the village of Thurston, in Yorkshire, in 1682. He was only a year old, when he was deprived, by small-pox, not only of his sight, but even of his eyes themselves, which were destroyed by abscess. Yet it was probably to this apparent misfortune that Saunderson chiefly owed both a good education, and the leisure he enjoyed, from his earliest years, for the cultivation of his mind and the acquisition of knowledge. He was sent when very young to the free school at Penniston, in the neighbourhood of his native place; and here, notwithstanding the mighty disadvantage under which it would seem that he must have contended with his schoolfellows, he soon distinguished himself by his proficiency in Greek and Latin. It is to be regretted that we have no account of the mode of teaching that was adopted by his master in so singular a case, or the manner in which the poor boy contrived to pursue his studies in the absence of that

sovereign organ to which the mind is wont to be chiefly indebted for knowledge. Some one must have read the lesson to him, till his memory, strengthened by the habit and the necessity of exertion, had obtained complete possession of it, and the mind, as it were, had made a book for itself, which it could read without the assistance of the eye. At all events, it is certain that the progress he made in this part of his education was such as is not often equalled, even by those to whom nature has given all the ordinary means of study; for he acquired so great a familiarity with the Greek language, as to be in the habit of having the works written in it read to him, and following the meaning of the author as if the composition had been in English, while he shewed his perfect mastery over the Latin, on many occasions in the course of his life, by both dictating and speaking it with the utmost fluency and command of expression.

These acquirements were due of course, in a great measure, to an excellent memory, which again owed, no doubt, much of its power and aptitude to the very difficulties under which it was obliged to exert itself. Every one of our faculties, corporeal and mental, is to a certain extent weakened, or at least prevented from reaching its utmost possible vigour and developement, by the assistance it usually receives in its labours from other faculties. Individuals deprived of the use of their hands have learned to write and paint with their toes; no reason in the world, certainly, why those in possession of the fitter and more natural instrument should relinquish it for the other, but yet an evidence of how much more some of our members are capable, and may be made by a certain discipline to perform, than we generally suppose. The German painter, RUGENDAS, celebrated for the spirit of his battle pieces, was ori

ginally an engraver, but was obliged to abandon that profession in consequence of a weakness in his right hand, which, however, permitted him to manage the pencil, although not the burin, and accordingly he applied himself to painting. But, some years after, his disease increased so much, that, even for the lighter work it had now to do, his right hand became quite unserviceable; and he would have been without a profession, or any means of subsistence at all, if he had not determined to make his left hand supply the place of its disabled companion. The experiment, after being persevered in for some time, succeeded perfectly, and he came at last to use the one hand with more ease and effect than he had ever done the other.

Any one of us, it is obvious from this, might acquire for himself two right hands instead of one, if he thought it worth his while, and chose to take the requisite pains. And the same rule holds as to the other organs and higher faculties. The peculiar attribute of the eye is to distinguish colours; there is none of its other functions which may not be performed by some one or more of the other senses. But yet it does commonly serve us in a variety of other ways; or rather, by means of the power it possesses of distinguishing colours, it is able better than any of the other senses to do us certain services which yet they also might be made to perform. However convenient this arrangement may be in most respects, it is not unattended with disadvantages. If we did not possess the faculty of sight, or never opened our eyes except when we wanted merely to distinguish colours, many of our other senses and faculties would acquire a degree of power of which we have scarcely any conception. We derive more knowledge of the external world from the eye, than from all our other senses put together; for

it is its power of distinguishing colours which we chiefly make use of to measure every variety of dis · tance, form, and motion, which objects assume, and of many of them to ascertain even a multitude of other qualities. Above all, it is by this simple power of distinguishing colours that we read books, and are enabled to drink our fill from these most abounding fountains of knowledge and reflection. But even without the eye, we should not be altogether destitute of the means of forming an acquaintance with the things around us. We should only have to make our other faculties do more than they now do. Our touch would detect inequalities in surfaces that now feel to us perfectly smooth; our taste and smell would acquire a delicacy and power of discernment, which would enable them to intimate to us, with exactness, the presence or approach of many bodies and substances, by which they are now scarcely affected; our hearing would come to their aid with a fineness of perception and discrimination that would tell the direction and distance of every sound, and measure with ease, and instinctively, differences of tone which at present only the closest attention can render sensible to the acutest ear. Undoubtedly we derive all this knowledge with infinitely greater convenience through the medium of the eye, than we should do by this augmentation of the powers of our other senses, which, if so invigorated, would probably occasion us no little annoyance and discomfort, in conveying to us the information we sought from them— to say nothing of the extremely inferior degree of service they would after all render us as compared with that which we receive from the eye. But the consideration of these sleeping capabilities which are in us (beside its importance in a philosophic point of view), ought not to be without its use both in shewing us, should we be deprived of the most valuable