Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/63

 nine years old when the photograph was taken. A helpless, almost motionless being. His arm is stiff—the hand and ringers wooden looking; the mouth hangs open (it is left as it was when he last stopped speaking). The eyes are fixed. It would be useless to coax this child's attention by appeals to the higher senses, and Séguin did not attempt anything of the kind. He began the boy's education by doing for him what the ordinary child does without any help. He took the stiff arm and began to move it up and down from the shoulder—then exercised forearm and wrist, and finally invented or rather copied (from the normal child) forty hand exercises. And by dint of all this hard work, carried on at first from without, and quite mechanically, the sleeping brain of the child was awakened, the frozen limbs began to live, to move. Those brain areas where movement is registered having been awakened by such movements, the thrill of life passed to higher levels, and a ray of intelligence began to shine in the vacant eyes.

Here is a portrait of the same child after nine months' education—if education it can be called—that treatment which he received in the first days almost as passively as an almost drowned man receives the attentions of those who are trying to