no POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the country. " No language to say it in," that expresses the condi- 

 tion of a deaf child's mind before he is taught very well, but perhaps 

 " and no language to think it in " should be added. Let the reader 

 try for himself and see how much consecutive thought he can ac- 

 complish without words ; and if, with his mind trained by years 

 of intelligent thinking, he can do little until the words come, let 

 him imagine, if he can, the state of a mind cut off from language. 



By way of example, let us take the seemingly simple fact of 

 similarity or likeness between two objects. Your three-year-old 

 baby says, " I want a woolly baa-lamb like that one," or " Dose 

 two kitties is dust alike," or " Mamma, you didn't give me the 

 same as brother" all expressions of the same idea of likeness. 

 Now, an ordinary deaf child is eight or nine years old before he 

 has acquired language enough to express either in speech or writ- 

 ing what the baby just learning to talk has said so easily namely, 

 the idea of similarity. Not but what he knows the things are 

 similar ; in this case it is simply the language that is wanting. 



Language is a growth. A hearing child begins to absorb lan- 

 guage from the very day of his birth. When he gets to be thirteen 

 or fourteen months old, sometimes when he is younger, he begins 

 to give back a word or two of the thousands of words which 

 have been given to him over and over again every waking hour 

 since he was born. It must be remembered that words spoken in 

 a child's hearing are just as much given to him as words spoken 

 directly to him. From the single words with which a baby begins 

 he goes on to phrases and sentences, constantly learning to use 

 more words or to use already familiar words in new ways, until at 

 seven or eight or nine he is able to talk about common things 

 just as intelligently as do his father and mother. In other words, 

 he has learned to talk. His language has grown with his growth, 

 nourished by the daily gifts of those about him, unconsciously 

 given and unconsciously received, no doubt, but none the less con- 

 tributing their share toward the future structure i. e., the ordi- 

 nary vocabulary of man. 



Now let us see how the deaf child fares during these impres- 

 sible years while his hearing brother is absorbing so much. He 

 sees just as much as do the people around him, but it is all unex- 

 plained. If you were set down suddenly in utterly strange sur- 

 roundings, you would be dazed until some explanation was made 

 to you, but the deaf child must go without explanation for years. 

 Life is one long pantomime to him until he goes to school, and 

 the pantomime often means one thing to the person who uses it 

 and another to the person who sees it. While the hearing child 

 is acquiring the language of home, of play, of the street, of time 

 and place and weather, of buying and selling, loving and praying, 

 the deaf child is gaining only crude ideas of all these subjects. 



