SPEECH FOR DEAF CHILDREN. 365 



secure these desirable gifts the pupil must "be educated by a sys- 

 tem which gives speech in the beginning and imparts all instruc- 

 tion through that medium. Prof. A. S. Hill, in calling attention 

 to the poor showing in written language even among the college- 

 bred, dwells upon the importance of practice sufficient to enable 

 the pupil to write without thought of the mechanical difficulties, 

 maintaining that to be the first essential in efforts to acquire a 

 good style. " A boy must have written much before he can form 

 his letters without special pains ; and much more before he can 

 set down what he has to say without stumbling over punctuation, 

 spelling, and grammar; and more still before he can write with 

 facility." Upon the same principle the deaf child must articulate 

 words long before he can do so readily ; must speak in sentences 

 long before he can do so fluently ; and must talk on every occa- 

 sion, to his teacher, to his classmate, in his lessons and in his play, 

 before he can do so easily to the stranger and in society. Practice 

 is the only means of attaining a spontaneous use of the vocal 

 organs. Nothing else will do away with a consciousness of the 

 mechanical difficulties. 



The hearing power of the young infant is an unknown quan- 

 tity, because the sensitive bundle of tissues responds quickly to 

 impressions from various sources and is thus misleading. A loud 

 noise may startle by its strong vibrations against the skin fully 

 as readily as by the auditory sense. Intelligent parents have 

 failed to discover deafness until their children were over a year 

 old. The look of the very young deaf child is usually an inter- 

 ested one, accompanied by fewer unnecessary movements of the 

 eye and less play of the facial muscles. From increased observant 

 faculty conies a marked development of the imitative functions. 

 The child's hands spring to his help. He goes through motions 

 that he has noticed those about him use ; in their case, however, 

 speech and lack of observation have kept them from conscious- 

 ness of those movements. They begin to see his, they are un- 

 aware of theirs ; to them the child has invented his own signs. 

 This fact discovers another. It is impossible for the normal hu- 

 man being of tender age to imitate easily a position of the mouth 

 unaccompanied by the sound belonging to it ; thereby proving the 

 ear guides him more than the eye, and it is the absence of the 

 hearing sense that obliges the vision to act early in behalf of the 

 deaf child. A boy of two years was told to imitate what he saw 

 in another's face ; the lips were pursed, but he failed to round his 

 until the sound of oo was made, though his deaf brother, noticing 

 his difficulty, brought a spool to him to show the shape. Through 

 hereditary tendencies the connection between the ear and the 

 speech center is short and practicable ; through educative means 

 that between the eye and the speech center may be complete and 



