Various

“ We are very far indeed from saying that one such year is sufficient to make a hearing man a qualified teacher of the deaf, but the arrangement is based on the right principle, and it sets his feet on the right path to learn how to teach—so far as this art can be learned. The recent regulation of the board of education in England, prohibiting hearing pupil teachers in schools for the deaf, is deplorable, retrograde and inimical to the best interests of the deaf. It shows a complete ignorance of their needs. The younger a teacher begins to mix with that class the better he will teach them. ”

“ He can never hear the tone of his teacher’s voice nor of his own; he can only see small and, in many instances, scarcely discernible movements of the lips, tongue, nose, cheeks and throat in those who are endeavouring to teach him to speak, and he can never hope to succeed in speech through the instrumentality of such unsatisfactory appeals to his eye as perfectly as the hearing child can with the ideal adaptation of the voice to the ear. ”

“ We may go still further and point out that to object to any sign on the ground of artificiality per se, is to strain at the gnat and to swallow the camel, for English itself is one of the most artificial languages in existence, and certainly is more open to such an objection than signs. If we apply the same test to English that is applied to signs by those who would rule out any which they suppose cannot come under the head of natural gesture or pantomime, what fraction of our so-called natural language should we have left? ”

“ It is difficult for a generation which has witnessed another complete revolution in the standards of artistic taste to realize the secret of David’s immense popularity in his own day. His style is severely academic, his colour lacking in richness and warmth, his execution hard and uninteresting in its very perfection. Subjects and treatment alike are inspired by the passing fashion of an age which had deceived itself into believing that it was living and moving in the spirit of classical antiquity. ”

“ And we are little concerned to inquire by what means the deaf pupil expresses himself in English so long as he does so express himself, whether by speech or writing, or as he does so express himself, whether by speech or writing or finger-spelling—for if he can finger-spell he can write. It is not the mere fact that he can make certain sounds or write certain letters or form the alphabet on his hands that should signify. It is the actual language that he uses, whatever be the means, and the thoughts that are enshrined in the language, that should be our criterion when judging of his education. ”

“ One of the most remarkable works by Andrea is the series of medallions with reliefs of Infants in white on a blue ground set on the front of the foundling hospital at Florence. These lovely child-figures are modelled with wonderful skill and variety, no two being alike. Andrea produced, for gilds and private persons, a large number of reliefs of the Madonna and Child varied with much invention, and all of extreme beauty of pose and sweetness of expression. ”

“ But there is not time for everything, and these are not as important in the case of the deaf pupil as language. Putting aside the question of religion and moral training, we consider the flooding of their minds with general knowledge, and the teaching of English to enable them to express their thoughts to their neighbours, to be of paramount importance, so paramount that all other branches of education in their turn pale into insignificance by comparison with these, while the question of methods of instruction should be subservient to these main ends. Too many make speech in itself an end. ”

“ The history of witchcraft in Europe and its attendant horrors, so vividly painted in Lecky’s Rise of Rationalism, are but echoes of this universal refusal of savage man to accept death as the natural end of life. Even to-day the ignorant peasantry of many European countries, Russia, Galicia and elsewhere, believe that all disease is the work of demons, and that medicinal herbs owe their curative properties to their being the materialized forms of benevolent spirits. ”

“ In technical skill he was quite the equal of Ghiberti, and, while possessing all Donatello’s vigour, dramatic power and originality, he very frequently excelled him in grace of attitude and soft beauty of expression. No sculptured work of the great 15th century ever surpassed the singing gallery which Luca made for the cathedral at Florence between 1431 and 1440, with its ten magnificent panels of singing angels and dancing boys, far exceeding in beauty those which Donatello in 1433 sculptured for the opposite gallery in the same choir. ”

“ A foreigner, unacquainted with the language, could not glean the drift of a conversation in English, except perhaps a trifle from the tone of the voices and more from the natural signs used—the smiles and frowns, the expressions of the faces, the play of eyes, lips, hands and whole body. ”

“ The inevitable reaction of the romantic movement made the masterpieces, which had filled the men of the Revolution with enthusiasm, seem cold and lifeless to those who had been taught to expect in art that atmosphere of mystery which in nature is everywhere present. Yet David was a great artist, and exercised in his day and generation a great influence. His pictures are magnificent in their composition and their draughtsmanship ”

“ He is already prepared to find a subject, predicate and object, in the sentence of a foreign language, even when he knows not a word of any but his own mother tongue. If he is told that a certain word in German is an adjective, he understands what its function is, even when he has yet to learn the meaning of the word. All this goes for nothing in the case of the deaf pupil. The very elementary fact that certain words denote certain objects—that there is such a class of word as substantives—comes as a revelation to most deaf children. ”

“ Mr William Wade has written a monograph on the blind-deaf of America, in the preface to which he points out, rightly, that the education of the blind-deaf is not such a stupendous task as people imagine it to be.
“It may not be amiss,” he says, “to state the methods of teaching the first steps to a deaf-blind pupil, that the public may see how exceedingly simple the fundamental principles are, and it should be remembered that those principles are exactly the same in the cases of the deaf and of the deaf-blind, the only difference being in the application—the deaf see, the deaf-blind feel. ”

“ English, spoken, written, printed or finger-spelled, is no more natural, comprehensible or easy of acquirement to the deaf than is Chinese. The manual alphabet is simply one way of expressing the vernacular on the fingers; it is no more the deaf-mute’s “natural” language than speech or writing, and if he cannot express himself by the latter modes of communicating, he cannot by spelling on the fingers. ”

“ The news of the revolution in Spain in January 1820 added fuel to their fury; it was the foolish and criminal policy of the royal favourite that had once more unchained the demon of revolution. Decazes was denounced as the new Sejanus, the modern Catiline; and when, on the 13th of February, the duke of Berry was murdered, clamorous tongues loudly accused him of being an accomplice in the crime. Decazes, indeed, foreseeing the storm, at once placed his resignation in the king’s hands. Louis at first refused. “They will attack,” he exclaimed, “not your system, my dear son, but mine.” ”

“ While it is gratifying to find that so much is being done in the way of educating this class of the community, the number of schools in most parts of the world is still lamentably inadequate. For instance, taking the school age as from seven to sixteen, which is now made compulsory by Act of Parliament in Great Britain, and assuming that 20% of the deaf population are of that age, as they are in England, there should be 40,000 deaf pupils under instruction in India alone, whereas there are but seventy-three. There are 200,000 deaf of all ages in India. ”

“ Thus the great attempt on the part of Athens to lead a harmonious league of free Greek states for the good of Hellas degenerated into an empire which proved intolerable to the autonomous states of Greece. Her failure was due partly to the commercial jealousy of Corinth working on the dull antipathy of Sparta, partly to the hatred of compromise and discipline which was fatally characteristic of Greece and especially of Ionian Greece, and partly also to the lack of tact and restraint shown by Athens and her representatives in her relations with the allies. ”

“ Thinking that the question may arise in the minds of some, ‘Does the sign language give the deaf, when used in public addresses, all that speech affords to the hearing?’ I will say that my experience and observation lead me to answer with a decided affirmative. On occasions almost without number it has been my privilege to interpret, through signs to the deaf, addresses given in speech; I have addressed hundreds of assemblages of deaf persons in the college, in schools I have visited, and elsewhere, using signs for the original expression of thought ”

“ The impulses that promoted a vein of thought cognate to deism were active both before and after the time of its greatest notoriety. But there are many reasons to show why, in the 17th century, men should have set themselves with a new zeal, in politics, law and theology, to follow the light of nature alone, and to cast aside the fetters of tradition and prescriptive right, of positive codes, and scholastic systems, and why in England especially there should, amongst numerous free-thinkers, have been not a few free writers. ”

“ Herein lay the whole strength of Debussy’s system, the perfection of his appeal to the mind and imagination as well as to the emotions and senses. Since its production the world has been enriched by La Mer, and by the Ariettes oubliées, but the lyric drama remains on its own lofty pedestal, a monument of elusive and subtle beauty, of emphatic originality and of charm. In an Apologia Debussy has declared that in composing Pelléas he “wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. Melody is, if I may say so, almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotion or life. ”

“ The deaf child never hears English, and so he never learns it till he goes to school. Here he has to start learning English—or whatever is the language of his native land—in the same way as a hearing boy learns a foreign language.
But another reason exists which renders his task much more difficult than that of a normal English schoolboy learning, say, German. The latter has two channels of information, the eye and the ear; the deaf boy has only one, the eye. The hearing boy learns German by what he hears of it in class as well as by reading it; the deaf boy can only learn by what he sees. ”

“ We were often asked by our deaf playmates in our childhood such questions (in signs) as “What does the cat say?”—“The dog talks, does he not?”—“Is the rainbow very hot on the roof of that house?” They have often told us such things as that they used to think someone went to the end of the earth and climbed up the sky to light the stars, and to pour down rain through a sieve.
But there is yet a third disadvantage for the already handicapped deaf boy. He has no other language to build upon, while the other has his mother tongue with which to compare the foreign language he is learning. ”

“ There must be many thousands of thousands of deaf (hundreds of thousands, if not thousands of thousands of whom are of school age) in that continent, unless indeed they are destroyed, which is not impossible. What are we to say of Africa, where only 100 pupils are being taught; of South America, with its paltry 200, and Australia’s 300? To come to Europe itself, Russia should have many times more pupils than her 1700. Even in Great Britain the education of the deaf was not made compulsory till 1893, and there are many still evading the law and growing up uneducated. ”

“ This animistic tendency is a marked characteristic of primitive Man in every land. The savage explains the processes of inanimate nature by assuming that living beings or spirits, possessed of capacities similar to his own, are within the inanimate object. The growth of a tree, the spark struck from a flint, the devastating floods of a river, mean to him the natural actions of beings within the tree, stone or water. And thus too he explains to himself the phenomena of human life, believing that each man has within him a mannikin or animal which dictates his actions in life. ”

“ None of these are languages in themselves; whether you use pen or type, hand or voice, you are but adopting one or other method of expressing one and the same tongue—English or whatever it may be, that of a “people of a strange speech and of a hard language, whose words they cannot understand.” The deaf child’s natural mode of communication—more natural to him than any verbal language is to hearing people—is the world-wide, natural language of signs. ”

“ Athens might fairly insist that the protection of the Aegean would become impossible if some of the chief islands were liable to be used as piratical strongholds, and further that it was only right that all should contribute in some way to the security which all enjoyed. The result was that, in the cases of Naxos and Thasos, for instance, the league’s resources were employed not against the Persians but against recalcitrant Greek islands, and that the Greek ideal of separate autonomy was outraged. ”

“ A small Ionic temple of marble with two caryatids between antae stood on this substructure. The sculpture from this treasury, which ornamented its frieze and pediment, is of great interest in the history of the development of the art, and the fragments of architectural mouldings are of great delicacy and beauty. The whole work is perhaps the most perfect example we possess of the transitional style of the early 5th century. Standing back somewhat from the path just as it bends round up the hill is the Theban treasury. Farther north, where the path turns again, is the Athenian treasury. ”

“ Dedication of Churches.—The custom of solemnly dedicating or consecrating buildings as churches or chapels set apart for Christian worship must be almost as old as Christianity itself. If we find no reference to it in the New Testament or in the very earliest apostolic or post-apostolic writings, it is merely due to the fact that Christian churches had not as yet begun to be built. Throughout the ante-Nicene period, until the reign of Constantine, Christian churches were few in number, and any public dedication of them would have been attended with danger in those days of heathen persecution. ”

“ Presumption of Death.—The fact of death may, in English law, be proved not only by direct but by presumptive evidence. When a person disappears, so that no direct proof of his whereabouts or death is obtainable, death may be presumed at the expiration of seven years from the period when the person was last heard of. It is always, however, a matter of fact for the jury, and the onus of proving the death lies on the party who asserts it. In Scotland, by the Presumption of Life (Scotland) Act 1891, the presumption is statutory. ”

“ The best-educated deaf in the world, as a class, are in America, and the American deaf sign almost to a man. It is true that at first a beginner in school may, when at a loss how to express himself in words, render his thoughts in sign-English, if we may use the expression, just as a schoolboy will sometimes put Latin words in the English order. That is, the deaf pupil puts the word in the natural order of the signs, which is really the logical order, and is much nearer the Latin sequence of words than the English. ”

“ The majority of deaf in every known country which is in favour of this means of education is so great that we venture to say that in no other section of the community could there be shown such an overwhelming preponderance of opinion on one side of any question which affects its well-being. ”

“ Facts are against them.’ Again, Graham Bell, who is generally considered an opponent of the sign system, says: ‘I think that if we have the mental condition of the child alone in view without reference to language, no language will reach the mind like the language of signs; it is the method of reaching the mind of the deaf child.’”
The opinions of the deaf themselves, from all parts of the world, are practically unanimous on this question. ”

“ A company proposing to borrow usually issues a prospectus, similar to the ordinary share prospectus, stating the amount of the issue, the dates for payment, the particulars of the property to be comprised in the security, the terms as to redemption, and so on, and inviting the public to subscribe. Underwriting is also resorted to, as in the case of shares, to ensure that the issue is taken up. There is no objection to a company issuing debentures or debenture stock at a discount, as there is to its issuing its shares at a discount. ”

“ Observe them generally, but dispense with them as circumstances, the pupil and opportunity may require. Strong individuality, sympathy, enthusiasm, long intercourse with the deaf, are needed in the teacher, and it is surely obvious that every teacher should have a full command of all the primary means of instruction to begin with, and not of one only.
Where deafness is absolute, or practically so, we have to seek for means that will appeal to the eye instead of the ear. Of these, we have the sign language, writing and printing, pictures, manual alphabets and lip-reading. ”