Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/355

 EDUCATION

307

EDUCATION

persons. The inmates of the hospice, after the ex- ample of the students and the craftsmen of the day, fomied among themseh-es a distinct brotherhood, to whom the saintly king gave special statutes and privi- leges. It is noteworthy that, in spite of the changes of government, the " Hospice des Quinze-Vingts" has siu-vived to this day. A .similar institution, though less extensive, was estalilished and endowed at Char- tres by King John the (!ood in 1350. Provision was made for 120 blind persons. For various reasons, however, the number of inmates dwindled till, in 1837, according to Dufau, there were but ten. A hospice for the blind is said to have been erected (1305) at Bruges, in Flanders, by Robert de Bethune, in grati- tude for the courage displayed by the inhabitants in repelling (1.300) an invasion of Philip the Fair. A similar foundation was made at Ghent by Peter Van der Leyen about 1370. Brotherhoods of the blind were formed, particularly at C'hartres, Caen, Chalons, Aleaux, Padua, Memming, Frankfort, and Hull. That the inmates of these institutions received other suit- able instruction besides that in the Catechism and in trades there can be no doubt. So desultorj-, however, were these attempts to gi\e the blind a modicum of education, and so inadequate were the means em- ployed, that the problem of their special education remained unsolved. No one had as yet suggested the idea of providing a permanent literature for them. As early as the sixteenth century attempts were made to devise special processes, but these attempts, so far as we know, met with very little success.

Among others, Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), an Italian mathematician, had pointed out a way of teach- ing the blind to read and write by the sense of touch. They were to trace with a steel bodkin or stylus the outline of each of the letters of the alphabet, engraved on metal, until they could distinguish the letters by the sense of touch and reproduce them on paper. Car- dano, however, failed to suggest how to WTite on a straight line with uniformity of space between the lines. In 1575 Rampazetto produced at Rome prints in in- taglio from letters carved in wood. His invention was dedicated to St. Charles Borromeo. In 15S0, under Phihp II, to wliom he dedicated his invention, Fran- cesco Lucas, at Madrid, engraved letters in wood for the instruction of the bhnd; but the letters being sunk in the wootl, the outlines could not as readily be fol- lowed with the finger-tips. In 1640, Pierre Moreau, a notary at Paris, had movable letters cast for the use of the blind, but for lack of means was unable to follow- up his undertaking. In his work, "Delicise mathe- maticse et physica; ", published at Nuremberg in 1651, George Harsdorffer describes how the blind can re- cognize, and be taught to name and imitate, letters engraved in wax. Padre Francesco Lana-Terzi, the same Italian Jesuit who anticipatcti by more than a century the system of lip-reading for deaf mutes, also suggested, as an improvement on Cardano's invention for the bhnd, a guide consisting of a series of wires and strings arranged in parallel lines at equal distances from one another, to secure straight writing and uni- formity of .space between the lines. Besides this, Lana-Terzi describes, in his " Prodromo", an invention of his own, by which the bhnd may be taught to cor- respond with each other by a secret code. We have looked in vain in works of reference for any descrip- tion of this cryptographic device. It is so simple that it can be learned in a few hours. Instead of compel- ling a blind person to learn hqw to form all the letters of the alphabet, the three methods pointed out by Lana-Terzi demand only a tactual knowledge of the letters, familiarity with their positions in their respec- tive sections, and a little skill; (1) to insert one, two, or three dots within a square or parts of a square or right angles turned in four different directions; or (2) to prefix to either a comma, colon, semicolon, period, or interrogation mark any one of the first four numerals;

or (3) merely to form these numerals. The letters of the alphabet with the lines enclosing them, Lana- Terzi suggests, should be in relief rather than in in- taglio, raised letters being far more distinguishable to the sense of touch than letters sunk in a plane sur- face. The following diagrams will make the matter clear.

First (Lana-Terzi) Method. — Suppose the blind cor- respondent wishes to send the cipher message. Son prigione (I am a prisoner), he will turn to his tablet,

a

§ u

^^v

S^ J

JiJ^

& ifp

C oC

J& % ^^^

and ascertain by touch that the letter s is the second of those enclosed within the lines forming the figuref"" He will trace this figure with a pencil, and, to I indicate that it is the second letter in the above figure, he will write, F^ either above, or below, or within it, two dots, thus l__ The message in full is as follows: —

EdB ER3U3dBE

Second Method. — The letters of the alphabet are em- bossed on a wooden or metallic tablet and distributed in any order w-hatever into five or more sections, which are indicated by lines in relief. Each section is dis- tinguished from the others by one of the five principal punctuation marks, formed, like the letters, in relief.

a4coL

'Xr.

OflC^

^^^f

The position of each letter in its own section is indi- cated by one of the first four numerals according to the order in the section. Thus, the message, II re ^ morto (the king is dead), would be W'ritten as follows: —

i: 2: A'

l; 3: 1.4. 2? r.

Third Method. — Instead of designating by punctua- tion marks the different sections into which the letters are distributed, they may be indicated by nuTierals, thus: —

aS-ccC \

2

■i, €77171 5

Of.^^4.

^Ctc

^

By this method the blintl person would have to learn how to form only the first five numerals. Thus the above message, 11 re e morto, according to this method, would be WTitten as follows: —

1-3 2-3 4-4 1-2 \-% 3-5 1-4 A-A 7r5 -H

the first numeral indicating the position of the letter in the section, and the second numeral the section it- self.

To enable the correspondent to make out for himself the answer to his message or communication, Lana-Terzi proposes the following plan: Let each of the correspondents have a table or long strip of wood