1 88 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDIN(?S 



employed in shorthand writing find their exact representatives in 

 the characters described by the fingers of the deaf and dumb. 



If great progress has been made in primary education through 

 the employment of the phonic method of instruction, and a large 

 portion of the child's time has been saved to him, over the old 

 method, why should not the same principle, substituting the hand 

 for the tongue, the eye for the ear, when employed in deaf-mute 

 instruction render the acquisition of knowledge more readily acces- 

 sible to the silent student ? 



By careful training and practice the deaf-mute is able to read 

 the lips of a deliberate speaker, or even of his non-speaking broth- 

 ers. This is, however, a slow process, and requires considerable 

 care on the part of the speaker and much acuteness on the part of 

 the student to obtain anything like satisfactory results. When we 

 consider that slight variations in lip positions for the different 

 sounds, variations which, let us remember, become more indistinct 

 as speech analysis proceeds, it will be seen that the labor of distin- 

 guishing the positions must be very great. Give him, however, a 

 manual in sympathy with the lips, and approximately correct, and 

 the labor is greatly diminished. I say approximately — throw away 

 the neutrals, retain the principals. 



As regards the man who has been born deaf, and who has- 

 never learned to use his vocal organs — he, with the man whose hear- 

 ing has become destroyed, has no guide to assist him in the utter- 

 ance of sound. The one learns to speak by imitation, the other 

 automatically utters the sounds, or their approximates, heard in ear- 

 lier life. Both are liable to error and variation in articulation. Let 

 the sounds uttered by the organs of the voice have their counter- 

 parts in the characters made by the fingers — let the fingers be so 

 many indexes to vocal positions — and the deaf speaker will have a 

 monitor that will in some degree compensate him for the loss of the 

 hearing faculty. 



Anyone famihar with the shorthand alphabet well knows the 

 simplicity of the characters employed to represent the different con- 

 sonants and vowels. These are arranged in a natural order, in 

 short are scientific. The thin sounds are indicated by thin or light 

 strokes, the thick sounds by thick or heavy strokes. The conso- 

 nents are arranged for the greater part in pairs, the one being the 

 thick or voiced sound of the other. . It is to be remembered that 



