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sciously : our attention is not directed to them, and they go 
on unobserved ; we are wholly occupied with the result , an 
not at all with the machinery which produces it. With the 
recently deaf, however, the language which had grown up 
with him from infancy,— which had become natural to him, 
and which had always been graced, too, by features of Nature s 
own,— tones of voice,— upon the loss of hearing, suddenly 
wears an altered aspect. He has hitherto been accustomed to 
it, associated with modulation,— cadence,— clothed m all the 
harmonious drapery of sound. It is now stripped of this, an 
presents itself to him shorn of its vitality,— a non-natural 
lifeless skeleton, formed by artificial adjustments of the vocal 
organs, but emitting no sound to his own ear. 
The fact is, that our vernacular tongue, descending to us, as 
it were, by inheritance, and acquired imperceptibly m child- 
hood, — and a wonderful acquirement it is,— seems to the 
child, as natural to him as eating, or drinking, or sleeping. 
He scarcely feels conscious that it is an acquirement at all ; 
and even when grown up, he little reflects that the words he 
uses are all but so many artificial conventions m themselves 
all, or nearly all, non - significant ; and not only that a rose 
bv any other name would smell as sweet,” but that any other 
name would be just as significant, or rather just as non-signi- 
ficant of its fragrance. But when his hearing is gone, and 
with it all that was really natural m his speech, vocal sound, 
gone too, he becomes painfully awakened to the fact that 
nothing but what is wholly artificial is now left to him ; and 
that what were once articulate sounds to his own ear, are 
henceforth to be, to him, only inaudible movements ot the 
vocal organs. . , n 
It is this sudden apparent transmutation of speech, trom 
the natural to the artificial, that creates m the mind of the 
deaf person the repugnance to employ it. That this aversion 
must be very great is obvious, since those who entertain it 
well know the trouble and inconvenience it occasions to all 
with whom they converse, — forcing them to read on the 
fingers, — an art in which few are expert, or else to receive m 
writing, still more slowly executed, every sentence addressed 
t0 Now I would ask,— If a highly enlightened and educated 
people, at great cost to themselves and others, knowing oo 
the full value of speech, cherish this almost unconquerable 
repugnance to the use of it, so soon as the only touch given to 
it by nature has become effaced, is it likely that an unen- 
lightened savage community, already in possession of an ex- 
pressive natural language, a language fully commensurate with 
