8 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



So far as their brains are concerned they have all the potentiali- 

 ties for speech and hearing, but the centres connected with these 

 functions remain inert, merely because untaught. They do 

 not often attain to the same standard of education as normal 

 people, because one of the principal channels of education is 

 entirely cut off, and all the knowledge which they acquire comes 

 through the visual and other remaining sense-organs. Their 

 intelligence, however, enables them to bring other centres not 

 usually employed for the purposes of inter-communication and 

 of expressing ideas, abstract and concrete, into a condition of 

 co-ordination, and without any necessary scholastic teaching 

 they automatically learn to communicate with each other and 

 with the outside world by means of that wonderful language of 

 signs through which the lights and shades of speech are alone 

 possible to them and such poetry as they possess is given 

 expression to. This co-opted language of signs, though not 

 taught in the schools, is handed down from generation to 

 generation of the deaf and dumb and is practically universal, 

 being understood by them all the world over. We had a 

 striking example of this fact some years ago when an Armenian 

 missionary gave an address to the deaf and dumb in this city. 

 He could speak no English and his Armenian thoughts were 

 entirely expressed in signs. The deaf members of his audience 

 closely followed all that he had to say, and the address was 

 spoken in English by an interpreter of the signs who, of course, 

 had no knowledge of the Armenian tongue. This universality 

 of the sign language was recognised by a Scotch schoolmaster 

 in Oxford, called Dalgarno, in the early part of the 17th century 

 (1626-87), and he wrote a book in 1664, entitled " Ars Signorum, 

 Vulgo Character Universalis," suggesting that it might be 

 employed as a universal language for the hearing as well as for 

 the deaf. 



We do not know whether the speech and hearing centres of 

 the deaf-mute fail to develop thoroughly because they are 



