524 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 301. 



All students of psychology will be interested 

 in her account of the discovery that things 

 have names and that one name may stand for 

 several things of a kind. She had been taken 

 to the pump -house to feel the water as it gushed 

 from the pump, and as she was enjoying the 

 pleasant sensation, I (Bliss Sullivan) spelled the 

 word ivater in her hand, and instantly the 

 secret of language was revealed to her. Helen 

 says: "That word, meaning water, startled 

 my soul, and it awoke full of the spirit of the 

 morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until 

 that day my mind had been like a darkened 

 chamber, waiting for words to enter, and light 

 the lamp, which is thought." 



The guiding principle of her early education 

 was this aphoristic precept by Professor Bell : 

 "I would have a deaf child read books in order 

 to learn the language, instead of learning the 

 language in order to read books." It is by 

 imitation that language is acquired, and it may 

 be that it was Helen's good fortune that she 

 was not able to copy from the feeble and ill-con- 

 sidered efforts to talk English, which make up 

 ordinary conversation. 



' ' The great principle that Miss Sullivan seems 

 to have had in mind," says Professor Bell, "in 

 the instruction of Helen, is one that appears 

 obvious enough when it is once formulated, and 

 one with which we are all familiar as the prin- 

 ciple involved in the acquisition of language by 

 ordinary hearing and speaking children. I 

 talked to her almost incessantly in her waking 

 hours"; says Miss Sullivan, " spelled into her 

 hand a description of what was transpiring 

 around us, what I saw, was doing, what others 

 were doing — anything, everything. Of course, 

 in doing this, I used multitudes of words she 

 did not understand at the time, and the exact 

 definition of which I did not stop to explain. I 

 gave her books printed in raised letters long 

 before she could read them, and she would 

 amuse herself for hours each day in carefully 

 passing her fingers over the words searching for 

 such as she knew, and she would scream with 

 delight whenever she found one. Helen's re- 

 markable comniand of language is due to the 

 fact that books printed in raised letters were 

 placed in her hands as soon as she knew the 

 formation of the letters. It is not necessary 



that a child should understand every word in a 

 book before he can read it with pleasure and 

 profit. Helen drank in language which she 

 at first could not understand, and it remained 

 in her mind until needed, when it fitted itself 

 naturally and easily into her conversation and 

 compositions. Thus she drew her vocabulary 

 from the best sources, standard literature, and 

 when the occasion came she was able to use it 

 without eifort. She has had the best and purest 

 models presented to her, and her conversation 

 and her writings are unconscious reproductions 

 of what she has read." 



So well had Miss Sullivan done her work that 

 the instructor who prepared Helen for college 

 says : "I read Shakespeare with her, and she 

 showed the greatest pleasure in the light and 

 amusing touches in 'As You Like It,' as well 

 as in the serious passages of ' King Henry 

 V.' We took up Burke's celebrated speech on 

 Conciliation with the Colonies, and every point 

 made an impression. The political bearing of 

 the arguments, the justice or injustice of this or 

 that, the history of the times, the characters of 

 the actors, the meaning of the words and the 

 peculiarities of style, all came under review, 

 whether I wished it or not, by the force of 

 Helen's interest." In the list of words which 

 she understood without explanation are policy, 

 impunity, immunity, dragooning, illation, in- 

 quisition, acquiesces, mediately, congruity, etc. 



II. Marriages of the Deaf in America ; an Inquiry 

 concerning the Eesults of Marriages of the 

 Deaf in America. By Edwaed Allen 

 Fay. 



Few books on the inheritance of human 

 faculties are more important than this volume 

 which Professor Fay has prepared as the result 

 of researches which have been carried on under 

 the auspices and through the aid of the Volta 

 Bureau. It is by far the most conclusive proof 

 which has ever been obtained that there is no 

 inheritance of acquired characters, so far at 

 least as the inheritance of deafness is in ques- 

 tion, for while Professsr Fay proves that the 

 marriage of deaf persons without deaf relatives 

 is no more likely to result in deaf children than 

 any marriage in the community at large, the 

 intermarriage of hearing persons who have deaf 



