692 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. He lost his sight when he was 
very young. Educated in this school, where he later became an 
instructor, he had received an elementary education, quite insufficient 
for the needs of his mind. He was also seized with that thirst for 
reading of which I have spoken. He listened eagerly to reading and 
developed his faculties by himself. Appointed professor on leaving 
school, and almost without preparation, he owed to his reading the 
solidity and originality of a very personal instruction. He had a 
singularly delicate literary taste. He wrote nothing, partly from 
modesty and partly because from his point of view execution was 
much inferior to conception. Simple, courageous, he taught a pri- 
mary class for eight years, and up to the time of his death. A little 
slow in mind as well as in body, he responded feebly to impressions 
from without, but he had singular powers of concentration, and his 
meditation was intense. When one had penetrated his rather cold 
exterior, one encountered a very active mind—a man of great pene- 
.tration and original thought. He was also an excellent adviser. I 
dwell on this example because M. Bernus, whom so many of his blind 
pupils have loved, appears to have united in himself so many of the 
most salient characteristics which are ordinarily found in the mind 
of the blind. 
Louis Braille, we are told, was of the same type of mind. His 
manner was reserved, his conversation was not brilliant, but the 
solidity of his thought caused all those who knew him to seek his 
opinion. From his youth he was able to concentrate his mind with 
so great tenacity on an idea that at the age of 17 years, after long 
groping and many fruitless combinations, he had already fixed on the 
marvelously simply alphabet with which his name will always be 
associated. 
A goodly number of blind persons seem to have achieved a certain 
notoriety by their intellectual culture. Unfortunately, we are gen- 
erally in ignorance of the conditions under which they developed and 
the means which they employed, and we lack precise data regarding 
their psychology. Many represent scarcely more than names to us. 
Among them are certain of the ancient Greeks and Romans, such as 
that Diodotus and that Aufidius of whom Cicero speaks in his Tuscu- 
lanes. Didymus of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth century of 
our era, is a little better known. Toward the end of the middle ages 
various scholars of remarkable memory, Nicaise, of Malines or of 
Verdun; Fernand, of Bruges, and Pierre Dupont, of Paris. Regard- 
ing Ulrich Schomberg (1601-1648) we have the testimony of Leibnitz. 
“He taught philosophy and mathematics at Konigsberg,” says Leib- 
nitz, “to the admiration of the whole world.” Although he did not 
lose his sight until 24 years of age, he did not retain any remembrance 
of light or of colors, so that visual impressions counted for nothing 
