BLIND. 



313 



most extraordinary part of the discriminating power 

 of some blind men, who seize upon the slight vari- 

 ations of the intonation of the voice, as we do 

 upon the changes of the countenance, and judge by 

 them of what is passing in the mind of the speaker. 

 We all of us wear at times a mask upon the coun- 

 tenance, and draw the curtain of hypocrisy over 

 this window of the soul, to conceal what is going 

 on within ; but we seldom think of the voice ; and 

 it is upon this that the blind man seizes, as upon a 

 thread, to direct him to the seat of the passions. 

 Hence it is, that some of them can ascertain on 

 so short an acquaintance the disposition and char- 

 acter of persons : they are not imposed on by the 

 splendour of dress, they are not prejudiced by an 

 ungainly air, they are not won by a smile, nor are 

 they dazzled by the blaze of beauty or led captive, 

 as many are wont to be, by the fascination of a 

 lovely eye. The voice is to them the criterion of 

 beauty, and when its melodious tones come forci- 

 bly stamped with sincerity from the soul, their 

 imaginations at once give to the speaker a graceful 

 form, and a beautiful face. It is recorded of the 

 father of Fletcher the novelist, that he was long 

 continued in the post of judge in the police court 

 of London, after he became blind ; and that be 

 knew the voices of more than three thousand of 

 the light-fingered gentry, and could recognise them 

 at once when brought in. 



The ear of some animals is surprisingly acute, 

 and there is no doubt that it is improved by blind- 

 ness ; we know of a horse who, after becoming 

 blind, evidently had his hearing very much sharp- 

 ened, for when feeding in the pasture with others, 

 far from the road, he would hear the sound of 

 hoofs, and raise his head and whinny out his salute 

 long before his companions betrayed any conscious- 

 ness of the approach of the passing stranger. So 

 with the blind man, when he is walking along the 

 street he can tell whether it is wide or narrow, 

 whether the houses are high or low, whether an 

 opening which he may be passing is a court closed 

 up at the end, or whether it has an outlet to ano- 

 ther street ; and he can tell by the sound of his 

 footsteps in what lane, or court, or square he is. 

 He goes along boldly, seeming to see with his ears, 

 and to have landmarks in the air. The accuracy 

 of the ear gives to blind persons a very great advan- 

 tage in music; they depend entirely upon it; and 

 hence they harmonize so well together, and keep such 

 perfect accord in time, that Paganini, after listen- 

 ing to some pieces performed by pupils of the in- 

 stitution for the blind in Paris, declared that he 

 never before had an adequate notion of what har- 

 mony was. 



The touch is capable of being equally perfected, 

 and many remarkable instances are given of this. 

 Sanderson, the blind professor of mathematics in 

 the university of Cambridge, became such a con- 

 noisseur of ancient, coins, that he could detect the 

 modern counterfeits, even when good eyes were 

 puzzled about them. There lived a few years ago 

 a blind man in Austria, who executed very good 

 busts by feeling the faces of persons, and imitating 

 them ; and there is now a bust of the late empe- 

 ror, executed by this blind man, and preserved in 

 the museum in Vienna, which is considered a very 

 pood likeness. Persons who have witnessed exhi- 

 bitions at the institutions for the blind, have been 

 surprised at the ease and fluency with which they 

 can read books printed in raised letters, by passing 

 the fingers rapidly over them: this, however, is by 



no means so extraordinary as many other instances 

 which are notorious, though not well understood. 

 A blind man, for instance, when walking in a per- 

 fect calm, can ascertain the proximity of objects by 

 the feeling of the atmosphere upon his face; it 

 would seem at first that the echo given back, were 

 it only from his breathing, might be sensible to his 

 ear; but we have ascertained by experiment, that 

 a blind man with his ears stopped, could tell when 

 any large object was close to his face, even when 

 it was approached so slowly as not to cause any 

 sensible current of air. 



It is a common supposition that the blind can 

 distinguish colours, but we are convinced that this 

 is impossible; all the blind, whom we have con- 

 sulted on the subject, have replied that they had 

 no such power, and they did not believe that any 

 blind person ever had it. Indeed what tangible 

 quality can there be in a substance so etherial, that 

 it passes unobstructed through dense glass? There 

 was an instance of a girl in England, who was gen- 

 erally believed to have this power ; and the trials 

 and tests which she successfully underwent some- 

 what puzzled us, until an explanation of the diffi- 

 culty offered itself in the chemical properties of the 

 different coloured rays of light. She could ascer- 

 tain the colours of different pieces of cloth by ap- 

 plying them to her lips in succession ; and she must 

 have learned that some colours radiate heat more 

 rapidly than others, so that she could tell white 

 from black by the different degree of warmth which 

 it imparted to her lips. This is perhaps one of the 

 most extraordinary instances of nicety of touch 

 which can be quoted. The same girl used to as- 

 tonish incredulous visitors by reading the large let- 

 ters of the maker's name, written in their hats, 

 while they held them behind her back. 



There is hardly a subject in the whole range of 

 science, which may not be mastered without the 

 aid of the sight ; this fact, if it be not deducible 

 from a consideration of the nature of' the senses, 

 may be established by numerous instances in his- 

 tory of blind men having raising themselves to 

 eminence in various professions. How little do 

 men in general learn by the sight, that they could 

 not learn without it? How vast and varied is the 

 knowledge of some men, who seldom go beyond 

 the bounds of the city in which they were born, 

 and whose knowledge is obtained from books ! But 

 cannot the same knowledge be obtained by hearing 

 books read by another? Nay! does not the mind 

 grasp it more firmly, and hold it more tenaciously? 

 The very facility with which we can glance over a 

 page, and the ease with which we can refer to it, 

 causes us to be negligent and inattentive ; the eye 

 often travels listlessly over sentences, while the 

 mind is travelling elsewhere; and sometimes, even 

 when performing two simultaneous operations of 

 reading and repeating aloud, we may be thinking 

 of something else. But the blind man has the 

 greatest inducement to attention ; he knows that 

 he cannot refer to the passages he hears, and he 

 therefore arranges and stores them away in his mind 

 with the greatest order, and can refer to them with 

 ease. The knowledge which we obtain from books, 

 however, will not be long beyond the reach of the 

 blind man, since ingenuity is fast bringing to perfec- 

 tion a system of printing for his use, of which we 

 shall speak by and by ; but even if it were so, there 

 is a still more vast and valuable mine of knowledge 

 which is to be explored by conversation and inter- 

 course with the world ; and to this the blind man 



