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 EDUCATION

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EDUCATION

different alphabets, seventeen of which were of a purely arbitrary character, were submitted to the society between 9 January, 1832, and 24 October, 1833. After much deliberation and a series of rigid tests, the medal was awarded (after Dr. Fry's death) to Alston, 31 May, 1S37. From the award made to Dr. Fry's alphabet, the Scottish Society of Arts evidently shared the idea of Haiiy and of other advocates of the Ro- man letter that in the education of the blind every- thing should be done to establish a bond of vital unity between them and the seeing and to lessen the isola- tion which arbitrary systems of print would only in- crea.se. As Alston's type was rather small and not very legible, his system did not stand the test of time. Lucas invented a stenographic system formed of arbi- trary characters and of numerous contractions. In this system the Gospel of St. John and the Acts of the Apostles were printed in 1837 and 1838 respectively. Frere devised a phonetic system which he himself describes as a "scientific representation of speech". It consists of 34 characters indicating each of the simple soimds in speech. Frere was tlie first to intro- duce (1839) the "return lines", in which the reading is alternately from left to right and from right to left, and the letters themselves are reversed in the lines from right to left. He also devised an ingenious sys- tem of embossing from stereotype plates; which in-

systems were different forms of the upper or lower case or of both upper and lower case, of the Roman letters. Owing to the size of the letters, the books embossed in other parts of Eiu'ope were much bulkier than those of like content in France or in England. For a long time after the introduction of the Braille system into Ger- many, line-print was retained, even where Braille was adopted. It was not mitil 1S76 that interest began to be aroused in regard to uniformity of embos.sed print- ing, in consequence, no doubt, of the movement in- augurated in England by the British and Foreign Blind Association in favour of Braille.

Embossed Printing in the United States. — From 1832, when the first school for the blind was opened in the United States, to 1860, when Dr. Pollack intro- duced Braille in the Missouri school (there being then as many as twenty-one institutions for the blind in this country), two systems of printing were in vogue. The first was that of Dr. Howe, the head of the Boston school for the blind, and the second that of Mr. Fried- lander, the principal of the Philadelphia school. Dr. Howe's system was the angular lower case Roman and Mr. Friedlander's system the Roman capitals of the Fry-Alston type. In 1835 Dr. Howe published sev- eral books in the Boston letter; Mr. Friedlander's Roman capital was not adopted in Philadelphia until 1837. I'lMin all educational as well as from an eco-

vention was. at the time, the greatest improvement in embossing since the days of Hauy. The larger part of the Okl and portions of the New Testament were printed in Frere's system. Dr. Moon of Brighton, who-se system is used more than any other by the adult blind, at least in England, devised, towards 1S45, an alphabet formed of more or less arbitrary characters, which either resemble or suggest a resemblance to the Roman letters which they represent. He also adopted, with a number of slight alterations, Frere's "return lines" and his method of stereotyping. The first book in Moon's system appeared in 1847. The printing of the Bible was begun in 1848 and completed in 1858. Moon's books, though easy to read owing to their large type, are very bulky and expensive; 56 voUnnes are required for the Protestant edition of the Bible, which omits a number of books contained in the Catholic edition. The chief defects of the Moon system are that it is not a writable system and that it lacks a musical notation. It is useful chiefly for adults w-hose finger- touch has been dulled by age or manual labour.

Emhiist'cil Printinij in Cantinenlnl Europe. — Between 1809, when embossed printing, of which he claimed to be the inventor, was begun by Klein, the founder of the first school for the blind at Vienna, and 1841, when Knie, principal of the institution for the blind at Bres- lau, introduced the Braille system into Germany, three styles of embossed printing, known as the Stachel-, Press-, and Punkticrte Typendruck (the needle-, line-, and pimcturcd print) had been used in Germany, Austria, Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark. These

nomical point of view, it is a matter of regret that, for the lack of concerted action between the principals of the Boston and the Philadelphia schools, two systems of print should have been imposed at the very outset on the country. From 1837 to 1853 the two systems flourished in their respective spheres without any agi- tation regarding uniformity of type. In 1851 the Boston line-print was given the preference over all other embossed systems at the London exhibition of in- dustries of all nations. This award, made tw'enty-six years after the appearance of Braille in France and one year after the adoption of the new system by the Paris institution for the blind, shows how deeply rooted was the theory prevailing since Haiiy, that the adoption of any system not resembling in form and ap- pearance the letters in common use would be preju- dicial to the best interests of the blind by furthering their segregation from the seeing. A comparison be- tween the leading systems of line-letter print which obtained recognition in France, England, and the United States shows that Haiiy's system gave 365 letters on 50 square inches of surface; Gall's, 526; Alston's, 891; Friedlander's (from 1833 to 1834), 290, and 826 after 1836; Howe's, 702 and by a further im- provement, it is claimed, 1067 letters.

Braille. — In spite of the perfection to which some of the line-letter systems had been brought as regards compactness, a careful study oi the functions and lim- itations of the sense of touch showed that the Roman systems, which lacked the quality of strong appeal to that sense (known as tangibility), could be of no edu-