senses themselves, and especially of hearing
She soon followed a voice calling to her at
several feet distance. This was her state
seven years ago: and, if such progress as
this were made in one year, we may hope that
now, at the age of nineteen (if she still live)
her case may have passed from being that of
a human being without senses, to that of one
being born to them very late, and having
them in an imperfect condition at last.

The earliest case of supposed extreme
deficiency of the senses which was fully and
properly recorded was that of which Dugald
Stewart was the historian; that of James
Mitchell, the son of a Scotch clergyman. The
boy was born in seventeen hundred and
ninety-five, totally deaf, but far from totally
blind. He was fond of the light, though he
could not distinguish objects; and his custom
was to shut himself up in a dark stable, and
stand for hours with his eye close to any
hole or chink which let in a ray of sunshine.
He bit pieces of glass into a proper shape,
and held them between his eye and the
sunshine, and got a candle all to himself in a
dark corner of a room. Moreover, his
senses of smell and taste were uncommonly
acute, and he obtained a great amount and
variety of knowledge by means of them.
The vast conception of communication
between people and things at a distance was
conveyed to him at once by smell (if not
even by such light as he was sensible of),
and there is nothing so difficult to convey
to those who have not his comparative
advantages. He knew his family and friends
some way off by his sense of smell; could
tell whether they came home with wet feet
or dry, and, no doubt, whether they had
been gathering sweet herbs in the garden,
or dressing the horse in the stable-yard.
Yet this boy, who had only one sense
absolutely deficient, and was cared for and
tended with the utmost assiduity by
educated people, and visited by philosophers,
remained unspeakably ignorant and
undeveloped in comparison with several persons
who instead of being totally deficient in only
one sense are possessed of only one. He used
his small means very actively for amusement;
but no one seems to have thought
of using them for his education. It was a
period when metaphysics were flourishing
more than science, and especially in his
neighbourhood; and poor James Mitchell
accordingly never learned to read or write,
or to speak any language at all. He taught
those about him a limited language by signs;
but they taught him none. When we read the
philosopher's account of him, of the guardian
sister's language of taps on the head, or
hand (which then appeared very clever);
and of his utterance being only "uncouth
bellowing" and boisterous laughter," we
think of the three, far happier cases of Edward,
Laura, and Oliver half a century later,
and bless the science that has brought, out
so much of the statue from its quarry—
so much of living mind from its apparently
impervious tomb. The night when Edward
Meystre's guardian, hearing his uncouth voice,
went to his room, and found him with folded
hands, saying aloud, "I am thinking of God
—I am thinking of God"—his first spontaneous
prayer—must have been the sweetest
in which ever the lover of his kind laid his
head on his pillow.

This case of Meystre is the first of
three to which our title applies. Here
the total absence of each sense was not
from birth. Edward, of whom we are
speaking, had a deaf-and-dumb brother, but
heard very well himself, as an infant, and
began to say "papa" and "mama," when the
small-pox deprived him of his hearing,
utterly and absolutely, at the age of eleven
months. There was fear for his eyes at the
same time; but they escaped, and he saw
perfectly well till the age of eight—an
immense advantage in regard to his future
development. It was a cruel accident that
deprived him of sight; and we pity the
perpetrator of the carelessness perhaps more
than the sufferer. A boy of eleven, Edward's
cousin, playing with his father's loaded gun,
aimed it at the door of the room, and, at the
precise moment when Edward was coming in,
discharged the piece, lodging the shot in the
poor child's face and eyes. The sufferer rent
his mother's heart by clinging to her for long
afterwards, saying, in his language of signs,
that it was always night. He wanted to have
his cousin killed; and his mother, strangely
enough, pacified him by telling him the boy
was dead and buried. He wanted to be
certain, and she took him to a new-made grave.
He stamped upon it with his feeble little foot;
and such was his moral education! Happily
he was taken under a wiser care; and the
time arrived, and before very long, when he
loved and consoled his poor cousin, and was
always glad to meet him while informing
other people who visited him that he had had
two eyes, and now had none, adding, turning
pale as he made the signs, that it is very
pleasant to be able to see.

At this time, his employment was handling
and cutting wood in his father's shop—his
father being a carpenter. When his father
left business, the lad cut wood for the
neighbours. It was sad that the one sense which
was now to be relied on should be impaired
by his hands being hardened and roughened
in this way; and, though he was taken into the
excellent Blind Asylum at Lausanne (maintained
by one beneficent English gentleman) at
the age of eighteen, his fingers never acquired
the delicacy of touch of the other pupils. There
is no evidence that his senses of smelll and taste
were turned to particular account in his
education; but they were not deficient, and
James Mitchell's case seems to show that
much might have been done by means of
them.