BORN BLIND AND DEAF. 5 



might have been expected from the practised eye of a joiner or 

 of an architect. It is not every operator, however dextrous in 

 his own art, who can be expected to attend sufficiently to these 

 collateral circumstances, or to be fully aware of the difficulty 

 which a blind person, suddenly put in possession of a new 

 sense, must experience, when he attempts to distinguish, in his 

 estimates of distances, the perceptions of the eye from those 

 of the ear or of the nostrils. Something of the same kind, in- 

 deed, or at least strikingly analogous to it, happens every mo- 

 ment to ourselves, in the judgments we pronounce on the beau- 

 ty or deformity of visible objects, without any suspicion, on 

 our part, how much these judgments are influenced by co-ex- 

 istent impressions of odour or of sound. 



In consequence of this view of the subject, I had been led 

 by the first general outline which I received of this occurrence, 

 to indulge a hope that the peculiarities of the case might offer 

 some facilities which had not been before experienced, for esta- 

 blishing by palpable and incontestible proofs, the distinction 

 between the original and the acquired perceptions of sight; 

 while, at the same time, the inability of the patient to an- 

 swer, by speech, the queries which might be proposed to him 

 with respect to the new world to which he had been so recent- 

 ly introduced, would, I conceived, by drawing the attention of 

 those around him to other signs of a less ambiguous nature, 

 place the results of their observations beyond the reach of 

 controversy. — Not that, even upon this supposition, every diffi- 

 culty would have been removed ; inasmuch as intimations con- 

 cerning distance may be occasionally conveyed to a blind man, 

 not only by the sense of smell, but by some of those feelings 

 which are commonly referred to the sense of Touch *. In ob- 

 serving, 



* The blind man of Puiseaux (mentioned by Diderot) judged of his dis- 

 tance from the fire-place by the degree of heat ; and of his approach to any so- 

 lid 



