obeys every intimation from her kind master and mistress. She did not for a year recover her cheerfulness, after the death of a favourite girl (eight years of age); but has since formed a friendly intercourse with two other young girls, and they seem perfectly to understand each other.

I hardly need advert to the well-known fact, that the human animal does not come into the world with an instinctive facility of adjusting the movements of the muscles even of his arms and legs, much less of the muscles by which the organs of sense are directed to their several objects by appropriate adjustments. The infant has to learn these, and is years in acquiring them. But if for the purposes of the sportsman, or of the arts of painting or sculpture, the difficulty of the acquisition is to the majority of our species all but insuperable. But this poor girl has all the requisite adjustments of eyes and ears still to learn. The most intelligent of the born blind have seen little more when newly couched than the confused light of objects, and have had to acquire the power of adjust

C

ing their eyes before they could distinguish the defined outline of their several parts, even of forms so little complicated as the triangle, the square, and the circle.

Sir Everard Home's boy could not distinguish a triangle at first sight, but was obliged to look at each angle separately before he was aware that there were three, and three only. Thus, too, persons (whose organs of sense are perfect) are quick in perception in proportion to the facility with which they can make the adjustments of the sense employed. Hence persons much advanced in years are, as I have before observed, dull of hearing and of sight, more from loss of tone in the adjusting muscles than from loss of sensibility of the sentient nerve. Cicero has evinced great acuteness in his observation on the unnecessary obscuration of intellect in the aged: "Manent ingenia senibus modo permaneant studia et industria." But as the adjustments of each of the organs of sense is required to regulate the adjustments of the muscular sense of other parts, the deaf are necessarily dumb. When Beethoven became

deaf, he could no longer so adjust his hands as to play intelligibly on his violin.

An acute boy, of eight years, whom I saw in the Asylum for the Deaf at Exeter, and to whom I have referred in a note at the foot of the second page, had not become deaf till after he had been able to read with great distinctness: but at the time I saw him he was fast becoming dumb from want of hearing to regulate the adjustments of his organs of speech. He read the beginning of a page with tolerable distinctness; but, as he proceeded, the sounds did not express words, and all was soon confused and indistinct.

"A gentleman, about sixty years of age, had been totally deaf nearly thirty years. He appeared to be a man of good understanding, and amused himself with reading, and by conversing either by the use of the pen, or by signs made with his fingers to represent letters. I observed, that he had so far forgotten the pronunciation of the language, that, when he attempted to speak, none of his words had distinct articulation, though his relations

could sometimes understand his meaning; but, which is much to the point, he assured me that in his dreams he always imagined that people conversed with him by signs or writing, and never that he heard any one speak to him. Hence it appears, that with the perceptions of sound, he has also lost the ideas of them. The organs of speech still retain somewhat of their usual habits of articulation. This observation may throw some light on the medical treatment of deaf people, as it may be learnt from their dreams whether the auditory nerve be paralytic, or their deafness be owing to some defect of the external organ. It rarely happens that the immediate organ of vision is perfectly destroyed.*"

Two men, who had been some years blind, -one from gutta serena-the other from loss of the whole substance of his eyes, told Dr. Darwin they did not remember ever to have dreamt of visible objects since the total loss of their sight.

Richard Bright, aged 68, became blind during a fever, attended with a sense of weight * Dr. Darwin's Zoonomia, vol. i. p. 22.

in his head and long delirium, for which he was blistered on the back of the neck. Has seldom dreamed since, and only three times of the light of the sun and stars and sunshine. Has perfect memory of these, and of things and places he had seen, and these are recalled, as visual, by his touch. But of the sensation of these touches, by which visual objects are recalled as if in his eyes, he has no reiteration-no memory. The touch of a table, chair, stick, or his Bible, which it is his chief amusement to con over in his mind, recalls the visual table, chair, stick, or Bible, which he had seen before he became blind. But these sensations of touch, after he has ceased to feel them, he cannot by any effort of his will recall.*

No sensation of a flash of light was excited, as it invariably is in those whose eyes are perfect, by placing broad pieces of zinc and silver inside his cheeks, and bringing them in contact.

*

From this instance, and that of another

"We cannot raise any sensation in our minds by willing it."-Dr. Reid on the Mind, p. 77.