314: THE SENSES, 



intimately allied. Of tins, blind people furnish examples. 

 Even though the calamity has supervened late in life, the 

 patient soon makes himself competent to the performance of 

 most ordinary, and many extraordinary, avocations of life. 



Huber, the bee-master, was a blind man, and the depart- 

 ment of natural history he illustrated needed close observa- 

 tion. A certain Kendal botanist was a blind man, and his 

 knowledge of the local flora was unrivalled. Of blind guides 

 records are numerous. Blind girls working cleverly at the 

 sewing-machine may be seen in plenty. In all these and 

 similar instances, touch is the sense which mostly, if not 

 altogether, acts vicariously for the lost sense. So well does 

 it accomplish the extra duty, that examples are not wanting 

 of blind people who have not only grown reconciled to their 

 calamity, but even come to feel grateful ; judging that their 

 power of mental concentration was increased thereby. The 

 celebrated mathematician, Euler, made some of his most 

 important calculations after he was blind. His admirable 

 treatise on Algebra, at once the simplest, the deepest, and 

 the most lucid ever written, was dictated to a tailor lad, long 

 after the mathematician could see no more. Milton was blind 

 when he wrote his master poems, and, more extraordinary, 

 Homer : more extraordinary, that is to say, if, as many critics 

 allege, the use of alphabetic characters had not been dis- 

 covered by the Greeks of those days. In the three last cases 

 touch could not, it is obvious, have supplemented vision ; but 

 it seemed well to throw into one group the examples of peo- 

 ple growing independent of so important a sense as the one 

 ministered to by the eye. 



Though the degree or the delicacy of touch varies in dif- 

 ferent species and in different individuals of the same species, 

 I believe no case is on record of an entire loss of this sense, 

 similarly to what happens in the case of sight and hearing. 

 Through accident certain special parts of the body may be 

 deprived of the faculty of common sensation ; and the entire 



