696 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
which I enriched little by little with new signs, no sentence of the 
course escaped me. As for the papers which I had to submit to my 
professors, I wrote them with a writing machine, the same which I 
am making use of at the present moment. It is a typewriter which 
differs in nothing from the ordinary model. Of course I am unable 
to see the letters inscribed on the keys which I strike, but memory 
very easily supplies this defect. Moreover, typewriters who can see 
always write without looking at the machine. 
For some years the blind have made much use of typewriting, and 
the process is so simple that less than an hour after I received my 
machine I wrote my first paper without assistance. The only dif- 
ficulty consists in the fact that I am unable to read over what is 
written. For that I am obliged to call on a person who can see. 
Owing to these methods, and also to the exceilent teachers, some of 
whom have shown toward me an unlimited devotion, I had no diffi- 
culty in keeping pace with my comrades, and I passed my classes with 
_ success. At the same time, I have accustomed myself to make the 
most of the conditions under which I labored, to profit by reading 
which I heard as much as by reading which I did for myself; to 
multiply my notes in “ braille,” and to classify them in a methodical 
and practical manner. All this was of service to me later. 
When I entered the higher normal school I felt at once that a 
change was effected in my studies. The work of assimilation, which 
was that of the secondary schools, was succeeded by the work of pro- 
duction, scientific work. I confess that at first [ was disquieted by it. 
It was necessary to go to the sources, to handle a mass of books with- 
out any guidance. My tastes led me toward literary history, and in 
no kind of studies does documentation present so many difficulties as 
in history. I regretted at times not being of a philosophical turn of 
mind, because I was aware that a philosopher demands less from 
books and draws more from his own resources. Necessity also im- 
posed on me the task of learning to use bibliographical aids as 
methodically as possible in order to guide with more certainty a 
secretary, who, moreover, became inseparable from me, who supplied 
me constantly with eyes, but eyes more and more passive in propor- 
tion as the needs became more personal and more complicated. Be- 
fore leaving school I applied myself to the study of Montaigne. 
In order that one may understand in what my task consisted, I am 
under the necessity (and for this I ask the pardon of my readers) of 
recalling briefly the point at which the study of Montaigne had 
arrived when I first took it up, and the object which I set before me. 
It is generally the custom to read the essays of Montaigne as if they 
constituted a homogeneous work and form an entity. One sought in 
his philosophy a single idea, almost a system, and as one frequently 
encountered contradictory judgments, some contended that they were 
