494 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Facts of a strictly scientific character are furnished by the study of 

 deaf-mutes. In my boyhood I was well acquainted with one of these 

 so-called unfortunates. He was a blacksmith, having learned the trade 

 from his father, and was associated with him in the business. When 

 the father desired him to do anything he addressed him in his natural 

 voice : " Dan, I want you to make a lot of horse-shoe nails " ; or he 

 might speak of something that had no connection with the shop as: 

 " To-morrow we will plant corn." This young man had never had any 

 systematic instruction and simply " picked up " his knowledge of Eng- 

 lish. In order to get some further light on the connexus of speech with 

 thought I addressed a letter of inquiry to superintendent Jones of the 

 Ohio Asylum for the Deaf. I quote from his reply. 



I take it your questions refer to the congenitally and totally deaf children. 

 Uneducated deaf-mutes would likely have an inarticulate noise to designate a 

 horse or a cow. Many such children have no such noise at all, but designate 

 them by marks or signs. Educated deaf children under the latest system of 

 teaching speech would have a distinct articulate name for " horse " or " cow," 

 and ill fact for all objects, actions, etc.; not so clear however as the hearing 

 person but yet clear enough to be understood. The deaf-mute carries on proc- 

 esses of reasoning just like the hearing person. Speech is not necessary to 

 reasoning, neither is language. To those who are familiar with the uneducated 

 deaf child, it is well known that he is in no wise apparently different from his 

 hearing brother. If nature's touch has not dwarfed or deformed his mental 

 powers, he is alert, active, quick to comprehend, quick to act and responsive 

 to calls upon his attention. His body is vibrant with energy and yields readily 

 to the activities of play and games. He answers the call of his parents to do 

 chores about the house with the same interest and enthusiasm as the other 

 children. He is familiar with the fields, orchards, trees which are near and 

 around his home. He is acquainted with the call of the physician and the 

 visit to the dentist and oculist, and knows the official function of one from 

 the other. Every piece of household furniture he knows and its use. He 

 knows the domestic from the wild animal; the one to pet and the other to 

 flee from. In fact as far as ideas are concerned he has perhaps as clear a con- 

 ception of the uses of everything around him as the other members of the 

 household. Yet he knows not a name of one. The accepted philosophy up to 

 the close of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth declared 

 that the deaf child could not be instructed because he lacked language. This 

 doctrine was upheld by some of the brightest minds that our most enlightened 

 countries of the middle ages and thereafter furnished. It was however discov- 

 ered that a great many bright deaf people had learned to express themselves 

 in various ways, showing their minds as abounding in good ideas with an 

 understanding of the nature and work of almost every thing with which they 

 came in contact, although they were unable to speak, read or write a single word. 



The facts above reported, as well as those that have come under my 

 own observation, partake largely of the mysterious. Speaking for 

 myself, I can not comprehend how it is possible to carry on a process of 

 reasoning wholly without the use of words. Such vagaries as we find in 

 " Alice in Wonderland " are not the product of reason, but rather of the 

 constructive imagination as distinguished from the creative. They are 



