plished in this important department of applied psychology, previous to the appearance of his treatise. A regular history of this branch of education, with extracts from the writings of its earlier promoters, now in general extremely rare, would form an interesting present, both to the speculative and to the practical philosopher. In the total absence of such a work, we may be pardoned in throwing briefly together a few scattered notices which have accidentally crossed us in the course of other enquiries.

In deducing a history of the progress in the art of educating the deaf and dumb, there are certain separate points of accomplishment which it is proper to distinguish. These are, 1. The teaching the pupil to understand, by the motions of the lips, &c., the speech of those around him; 2. To communicate his own thoughts in the articulate sounds of a language; 3. To read writ; 4. To employ letters and words, denoted by certain conventional motions of the hand. There is, however, a fifth point, of still higher and more difficult accomplishment, and on which the easy, certain, and complete success of the whole attempt depends;—that is, a determination of the psychological laws, by which the order and objects of instruction under the condition of deafness is regulated.

As the result of a philosophical deduction, it was naturally to be expected that the last of these should only be realized after the possibility and conditions of the method in general had been empirically proved in the other four. In the present instance, however, theory did not merely only follow practice-it long prevented its application; and the deaf and dumb had been actually taught the use of speech before the philosophers would admit their capacity of instruction. The dictum of Aristotle, that of all the senses, hearing contributes the most to intelligence and knowledge (s peónov Risov), was taken apart from the qualifications under which that illustrious thinker advanced the proposition (viz. that this was only by accident, inasmuch as hearing is the sense of sound, and sound contingently the vehicle of thought); and was alleged to prove, what was in fact the very converse of its true import, that the deaf are wholly incapable of intellectual instruction.

In like manner, a dogma of the physicians, which remounts we believe to Galen, that dumbness was not, as Aristotle had affirmed, in general a mere consequent of deafness, but the effect of a common organic lesion of the lingual and auditory nerves, arising as they do from a neighbouring origin in the brain-was generally admitted as conclusive against the possibility of a deaf person being taught to articulate sounds. It was, therefore, with

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wonder and doubt that the first examples of the falsehood of these assumptions were received by the learned. The disabilities which the Roman law, and the older codes of every European jurispru dence, imposed on the deaf and dumb, were all founded in the principle-Surdus natus est mutus et plane indisciplinabilis, as Molinæus has it.

Rodolphus Agricola, who died in 1485, is the oldest testimony we recollect to a capacity in the deaf and dumb of an intelligent education; and it is remarkable that there is none older. In the last chapter of his posthumous work, De Inventione Dialectica, as an illustration of the immense and almost in'credible power of the human mind,' he instances 'as little less than 'miraculous, what he himself had witnessed,-a person deaf from infancy, and consequently dumb, who had learned to understand writing, and, as if possessed of speech, was able to write down his whole thoughts. Vives, some fifty years later, in his treatise De Anima (L. ii. c. De Discendi ratione), after noticing that Aristotle had justly styled the ear the organ of instruction, expresses his wonder that there should have been a person born ' deaf and dumb who had learned letters: let the belief in this' (he says) rest with Rodolphus Agricola, who has recorded the fact, and affirmed that he himself beheld it.' The countrymen of the unbelieving Vives were, however, destined, in the following generation, to be the inventors of the art in question.

The oldest indication we have of any systematic attempt at educating the deaf, is by Franciscus Vallesius, the celebrated Spanish physician, who, in his Philosophia Sacra, published in 1590, mentions that a friend of his, Petrus Pontius, a Benedic 'tine monk, taught the deaf to speak by no other art than instruct ing them first to write, then pointing out to them the objects signified by the written characters, and finally guiding them to those motions of the tongue, &c. which correspond to the 'characters.' What more is now accomplished? Pontius does not appear to have published an account of his method. This, however, was done by John Paul Bonnet, secretary to the Constable of Castile, who, in 1620, printed, in Spanish, at Madrid, his Reduction of Letters, and Art of Instructing the Dumb. That this work of Bonnet contains only the practice of Pontius is proved by the evidence of Perez in the book itself, and that of Antonius in his Bibliotheca Hispanica. Of the signal success of the art in the hands of Pontius (among others on two brothers and a sister of the Constable of Castile) we have accounts by Antonius, by Morales, and a very curious one by Sir Kenelm Digby, of what he saw himself in the younger brother of the Constable, when he accompanied Charles I., when Prince of

Wales, in his expedition into Spain, and to whom he appeals as a fellow-witness with himself.

There was a nobleman of great quality that I knew in Spain, the younger brother of the Constable of Castile, who was taught to heare the sounds of words with his eyes (if that expression may be permitted). This Spanish Lord was born deafe, so deafe that if a gun were shot off close by his eare he could not heare it, and consequently he was dumbe; for not being able to heare the sound of words, he could never imitate nor understand them: The lovelinesse of his face, and especially the exceeding life and spiritfulnesse of his eyes, and the comelinesse of his person, and the whole composure of his body throughout, were pregnant signes of a well-tempered mind within. And therefore all that knew him lamented much the want of meanes to cultivate it, and to embrue it with the notions, which it seemed to be capable of, in regard of itself, had it not been crossed by this unhappy accident, which to remedie physicians and chyrurgions had long employed their skill, but all in vaine. At the last there was a priest, who undertooke the teaching him to understand others when they spoke, and to speake himselfe that others might understand him, for which attempt at first he was laughed at, yet after some yeares he was looked upon as if he had wrought a miracle. In a word, after strange patience, constancie, and paines, he brought the young lord to speak as distinctly as any man whatsoever; and to understand so perfectly what others said, that he would not lose a word in a whole dayes conversation. I have often discoursed with the priest whilst I waited upon the Prince of Wales (now our gracious Sovereign) in Spain, and I doubt not but his Majesty remembreth all I have said of him, and much more for his Majesty was very curious to observe, and enquire into the utmost of it. It is true, one great misbecomeingnesse he was apt to fall into, whilst he spoke which was an uncertainty in the tone of his voyce, for not hearing the sound he made when he spoke, he could not steadily governe the pitch of his voyce, but it would be sometimes higher, and sometimes lower, though for the most part what he delivered together he ended in the same key as he began it. But when he had once suffered the passage of his voyce to close, at the opening it again, chance, or the measure of his earnestness to speak or reply, gave him his tone, which he was not capable of moderating by such an artifice, as is recorded Caius Gracchus used, when passion in his orations to the people, drove out his voice with too great a vehemency or shrilnesse. He could discerne in another whether he spoke shrill or low; and he would repeat after any bodie any hard word whatsoever, which the Prince tried often, not only in English, but by making some Welchmen that served his Highnesse speak words of their language, which he so perfectly ecchoed, that I confesse I wondered more at that than at all the rest, and his master himself would acknowledge that the rules of his art reached not to produce that effect with any certainty. And, therefore, concluded this in him must spring from other rules he had framed unto himselfe out of his own attentive observation; which the advantages which nature had justly given him in the sharpnesse of senses to supply the want of this,

endowed him with an ability and sagacity to do beyond any other man that had his hearing. He expressed it, surely, in a high measure by his so exact imitation of the Welch pronunciation; for that tongue (like the Hebrew) employeth much the guttural letters, and the motions of that part which frameth them cannot be seen or judged by the eye, otherwise than by the effect they may happily make by consent in the other parts of the mouth exposed to view. For the knowledge he had of what they said sprung from his observing the motions they made, so that he could converse currently in the light, though they he talked with whispered never so softly. And I have seen him at the distance of a large cham ber's breadth say words after one, that I standing close by the speaker could not hear a syllable of. But if he were in the darke, or if one turned his face out of his sight he was capable of nothing one said.'-(Treatise of Bodies.)

The prejudice was now dispelled that the deaf and dumb were incapable of education; and during the course of the seventeenth century, many examples are recorded of their successful instruction without even the aid of a teacher experienced in the art.

Though nothing can be clearer than the right of Spain to the original invention of this art in all its branches, we, however, find it claimed, at a much later period, and in the same year, (1670), by Lana, the Italian Jesuit, in his Prodromo ; and for Dr John Wallis, Professor of Geometry in Oxford, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The precepts of the former are neither new nor important; and the latter can only vindicate his originality by an ignorance of what had previously been effected. Wallis appears to have long (that is, before the appearance of Dalgarno's work) applied himself mainly to the comparatively unimportant point of enabling the deaf to enunciate words. Without undervaluing the merit of his treatise on the nature and pronunciation of letters, in the introduction to his English grammar, nor the success of his principles in enabling the deaf to speak, all this had been previously done by others with equal ability and success. The nature of letters, the organic modifications for the production of the various vocal sounds, had been investigated by Fabricius ab Aquapendente in his treatise De Locutione; and thereafter with remarkable accuracy and minuteness by P. Montanus in his Account of a New Art called the Art of Speech, published in Holland many years prior to the grammar of Dr Wallis-while Bonnet, in the work already mentioned, had, in the first book, treated of the nature of letters and their pro⚫nunciation among different nations,' and in the second, 'showed how the mute may be taught the figure and pronunciation of letters by manual demonstration, and the motion of the mouth and lips. Wallis's originality can indeed hardly be maintained in relation even to English writers.

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To say nothing of Lord Bacon's recommendation of the 'motions of the tongue, lips, throat, palate, &c., which go to the 'making up of the several letters, as a subject worthy of enquiry,' John Bulwer had, in the year 1648, published his curious treatise, entitled, Philocophus, or the Deafe and Dumbe Man's 'Friend, exhibiting the philosophical verity of that subtile art, which 'may inable one with an observant eie, to heare what any man speaks 'by the moving of his lips. Upon the same ground, with the advan'tage of an historical exemplification, apparently proving, that a 'man borne deafe and dumbe, may be taught to heare the sounds of 'words with his eie, and thence learn to speak with his tongue. By 'J. B. sirnamed the Chirosopher. London, 1648.'

It

Bulwer appears to have been ignorant of Bonnet's book, but he records many remarkable cases, several within his own experience, of what had been accomplished for the education of the deaf. He was the first also to recommend the institution of ' an academy of the mute,' and to notice the capacity which deaf persons usually possess of enjoying music through the medium of the teeth-a fact which has latterly been turned to excellent account, especially in Germany; and there principally by Father Robertson, a monk of the Scots College of Ratisbon, by whose exertions a new source of instruction and enjoyment has thus been opened up to those otherwise insensible to sounds. is remarkable that Bulwer, who had previously written a work on Chirologia, or the Natural Language of the Hand,' and who had thence even obtained the surname of the Chirosopher,' should have suggested nothing in regard to a method of speaking on the fingers; and it is still more singular that his attention was not called to this device, as he himself has mentioned a remarkable case in which it had been actually applied. A pregnant ' example,' he says, of the officious nature of the touch, in sup'plying the defect or temporall incapacity of the other senses, we ' have in one Master Babington, of Burntwood, in the county of • Essex, an ingenious gentleman, who, through some sicknesse, 'becoming deaf, doth, notwithstanding, feele words, and, as if ' he had an eye in his finger, sees signes in the darke; whose wife discourseth very perfectly with him by a strange way of 'arthrologie, or alphabet, contrived on the joynts of his fingers, 'who, taking him by the hand in the night, can so discourse 'with him very exactly; for he feeling the joynts which she toucheth for letters, by them collected into words, very readily ' conceives what she would suggest to him.' P. 106.

We pass over Holder's Elements of Speech-An Essay of Enquiry into the Natural Production of Letters, with an Ap'pendix to instruct Persons Deaf and Dumb;' and Sibscote's