No. 157.] 
MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 
JUNE }, 1807. 
[5 of Vox. 23. 
** As long as thofe who write are ambitious of making Converts, and of giving to their Opinions a Maximum of 
* Influence and Celebrity, the moft extenfively circulated Mifcellany will repay with the greatett Effect the 
** Curiofity of thefe who read either for Amufement or InfttuSion.” JOHNSON, 
ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. 
For the Monthly Magazine. 
ON THE STATE OF THE EDUCATION OF 
THE DEAF AND DUMB THROUGHOUT 
EUROPE. 
F the art of instructing the deaf and 
dumb of our species to converse with 
their fellow creatures cannot be traced 
to times of very remote antiquity, a 
position [ by no means propose to lay 
down, it is, however, one which must 
not. be ranked among the discoveries that 
belong iz principe to the present age. 
We know of works upon the subject. of 
teaching the deaf and dumb to think and- 
write, and to learn useful arts, so early 
as the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. I shall instance one in [talian, by 
Signor Athnate, printed in 1606; and 
another in Spanish, by Don Juan Pablo 
Bonet, primted in 1620. ‘These two 
books are generally reputed to be the 
oldest upon thesubject extant. We have, 
besides, the Surdus loquens of Dactor 
Amman, a Swiss physician, who taught. 
several deaf-dumb children to speak in 
Amsterdam above a hundred years ago, 
and his de Loguela, the turmer printed in 
1692, the latterin 1700. In addition to 
these documents of what has been before 
our day, we have proofs that a very few 
years after the publication of the Ita- 
lian and Spanish works just mentioned, 
and before Dr. Amman began to instruct 
any person whatever, some Englishmen 
of great learning and ingenuity conceived 
the extensive and astonishing idea of 
teaching the deaf-dumb to understand the 
conversation of others by sight, and to 
speak themselves; an mvention calcu- 
lated to afford to them a complete partici- 
pation in the same means of develope- 
ment and expansion of the mind, enjoyed 
by the rest of mankind. The faculty of 
speech was theucelorward made known 
to those who seemed for ever excluded 
from its advantages; and the art has been 
practised, with the intermission of some 
very short intervals, in some part of 
Great Britain ever since. 
The principles that led to the first idea 
-Montaty Mac., No. 157, 
of teaching those persons to speak who are 
dumb only in consequence of their being 
deaf (or the deaf-dumb, as I shall call 
them, to contradistinguish them from 
those who are both dumb and deaf by 
nature), are very simple. 
Hearing is the universal medium of in- 
tercourse among men ; it is also the me 
diuin by which men learn to express their 
thoughts to one another by sounds, that 
is, to speak. Hearing excites the child 
to make exertions for producing sounds 
like those which he learus to understand, 
day after day, as the usual siguals of 
thought and will among men. Hearing 
is atthe same time the criterion by which 
a child judges every sound, and regulates 
his first attempts to mould and exercise 
his organs in the way that produces 
sounds like those uttered by the persons 
about him. The déprivation of hearing 
from the period of infancy, whether ac- 
cidental or constitutional, being almost 
without an exception accompanied with 
absence of speech, it became the re- 
ceived opinion, that where the sense of 
hearing was not to be excited, it was im- 
possible for a person so circumstanced to 
understand ora! discourse, much more to 
pronounce intelligible sounds. 
‘The sense of seeing, however, is very 
acute ; and as our sense of hearing is al- 
ways observed to be stronger and more 
accurate in the dark, because then all our 
powers of attention are concentered upon 
that one method of perception, so with 
the deaf, their sense of seeing is generally 
quicker than ours, because better ex- 
ercised, and their attention is not di- 
vided with a sense so powerful as that of. 
hearing. If, then, ordinary persons can 
take notice of the variety of changes the 
muscles of the face undergo in proncun- 
cing any set of articulate sounds what- 
ever; and we admit (what it is impose 
sible to deny) that souuds which are dis- 
tinct, must have been produced by dis- 
tinct motions ; it follows, to the ‘compre- 
hension of everyone, that the acute and 
well-exercised »sight of 2 deaf person, 
3G : whose 
