Mr W. M. Stone, principal of the Royal Blind School at West Craigmillar, Edinburgh, gives this very interesting information:
"We have five blind-deaf children at this institution, and all are wonderfully clever and intelligent. In all cases the children possessed hearing for a time and had some knowledge--very slight in some cases--of language. The method of teaching is, first to teach them the names of common objects on their fingers. A well-known object is put in the child's hand and then the word is spelled on the hand,--the child's hand of course. The child learns to associate these signs--he does not know they are letters--with the object, and so he learns a name. Other names are then given and similar names are associated together, and by noticing the difference in the names the child gradually grasps the idea of an alphabet. For instance, if he learns the words cat, bat and mat, he will quickly distinguish that the words are alike except in their initial letters. When in this way language has been acquired he is taught the Braille system of reading for the blind and his progress is now very rapid. This method may appear very complicated and difficult, but in reality it is not so. There are no institutions in Great Britain specially for the blind-deaf, nor are there any in America. I do not know of any on the continent. Our own blind children here are receiving the same education as our other children, and in some ways are more advanced than seeing and hearing children of their own ages. They not only read, write and do arithmetic, but they do typewriting and much manual work."
Mr Addison mentions two deaf and blind pupils who were taught by the late Mr Paterson of Manchester, and a third in the same school later on. Another was taught in the asylum for the blind in Glasgow, though she only lost hearing and became deaf at ten.
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_. Some familiar, tangible object--a doll, a cup, or what not--is given to the pupil, and at the same time the name of the object is spelled into its hand by the manual alphabet." (The one-hand alphabet is in vogue in America.) "By patient persistence, the pupil comes to recognize the manual spelling as a _name_ for a familiar object, when the next step is taken--associating familiar acts with the corresponding manual spelling. A continuation of this simple process gradually leads the pupils to the comprehension of language as a means for communication of thoughts." Mr Wade is right. Given a sympathetic, resourceful teacher with strong individuality, common-sense, patience, and the necessary amount of time, anything and everything in the way of teaching them is not only possible but certain to be achieved. Language,--give the deaf and the blind-deaf a working command of that and everything else is easy.