62 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
familiarity with the English language, and I shall show that it 
results from a wide-spread fallacy regarding the nature of language 
and the means by which our language should be taught. In the 
meantime I shall simply direct attention to the fact that those who 
are deaf from infancy do not, as a general rule, become familiar 
with the English language even in its written form. 
It is obvious that if we talk to deaf children by word of mouth, 
and refrain from explaining, by writing or some other clearly visi- 
ble means, the words that are ambiguous, those pupils who are 
already familiar with the language have very great advantages 
over the others. They have a fund of words from which to draw, 
they can guess at the ambiguous word and substitute other words 
within their knowledge so as finally to arrive at the correct mean- 
ing. But young children who have been deaf from infancy and 
who never, therefore, have known our language, are not qualified 
at once for this species of guess-work. They know no words ex- 
cepting those we teach them, and haye, therefore, no fund to draw 
upon in case of perplexity. If we commence the education of 
such children by speech-reading alone they are plunged into dif- 
ficulties to which they have not the key. 
To such children it becomes a matter of absolute necessity that 
our language should be presented to them in an unambiguous form. 
With such pupils, writing should be the main reliance, and speech- 
reading can only be satisfactorily acquired by the constant accom- 
paniment of writing, or its equivalent—a manual alphabet. I have 
no hesitation in saying that the attempt to carry on the general 
education of young children who are deaf from infancy by means 
of articulation and speech-reading alone, without the habitual use 
of English in a more clearly visible form, would tend to retard their 
mental development. Ido not mean to say that this is ever actu- 
ally done, but I know there is a tendency among teachers of articu- 
lation to rely too much upon the general intelligibility of their 
speech. Let them realize that the intelligibility is almost entirely _ 
due to context, and they will rely more upon writing and less upon 
the mouth in their instructions to young congenitally deaf children. 
After a probationary period, pupils who could speak before they 
became deaf become so expert in speech-reading that the regular 
instruction of the school-room can be carried on through its means 
without detriment to the pupil’s progress. The exceptional cases 
of congenitally deaf persons who have become expert in this art 
