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GENERAL MEETING. 19 
any, attempts are made to teach articulation to those who have not 
naturally spoken.” In most of the larger institutions for the deaf 
in this country, every pupil is afforded an opportunity to acquire 
speech, and instruction in this is discontinued only when success 
seems plainly unattainable. 
It is a great error to suppose it to be true of a deaf person edu- 
cated on what Mr. Bell calls the sign-method, that, “as a general . 
rule, when his education is completed, his knowledge of the English 
language is like the knowledge of French or German _ possessed 
by the average hearing child on leaving school,” or to say that 
“he cannot read an ordinary book intelligently without frequent 
recourse to a dictionary.” On the contrary, a majority of persons 
thus educated have a good knowledge of their vernacular, are 
able to use it readily as a means of communication with hear- 
ing persons, and are able to read intelligently without frequent 
recourse to the dictionary. 
When Mr. Bell has become familiar with the peculiarities of 
the deaf by personal contact with a large number of this class 
of persons, I am confident he will not repeat his assertion that 
“nature has inflicted upon the deaf child but one defect—imperfect 
hearing.” For he will then have discovered, what has long been 
known to teachers of experience, that deaf children, in addition to 
their principal disability, are often found to be lacking in mental 
capacity, or in the imitative faculty, in the power of visual or tactile 
perception, and in other respects; all of which deficiencies, though 
they do not amount even to feeble-mindedness, much less to idiocy, 
do operate against the attainment of success in speech, as well as 
in other things which go to complete the education of such chil- 
dren. . 
Passing over several points of relatively small importance, in 
regard to which I believe Mr. Bell’s views to be subject to criti- 
cism, I come to his characterization as a fallacy of the opinion 
held by many “that the language of gestures is the only language 
natural to the child born deaf or who has become deaf in infancy.” 
I think that in order to sustain his view that this is a fallacy 
Professor Bell gives a strained and very unusual meaning to the 
words “natural language.” If, as he explains, a natural language 
is any one that a child may happen to be first taught by those with 
whom he is associated, then I should have no controversy with him. 
But I understand a natural language to be one that is mainly spon- 
taneous, and not at all one that is borne in upon a child from without. 
