Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/661

Rh tainted stock deafness occurs, and disappears and recurs, generation after generation; and in another collateral branch blindness pursues the same wayward and yet persistent course; and strangest of all, idiocy itself creeps out here and there. Blindness and deafness are not the children of idiocy, but blindness goes on intensifying its peculiar brain cell and fiber lesion until the whole central shrine of the mind is vitiated and a.n idiot is born; and deafness grows and grows into a similar vice of the whole nervous system.

All this means that blindness and deafness are ill weeds which thrive apace if left uneradicated by proper specific education, and that, like the fly in the potter's ointment, they in time impeach the entire mental integrity.

The percentage in this town is, therefore, greater than anywhere else as regards its ratio of afflicted persons. They are like Darwin's cats with white fur and blue eyes, who are always deaf.

Miss Camilla E. Teisen, who was formerly employed in Johan Keller's Institution for Feeble-minded Children in Copenhagen, Denmark, and who is now settled down as chief instructress in the Pennsylvania Institute for Feeble-minded Children at Elwyn, Pa., has very kindly answered a number of pertinent questions which I asked her regarding the relative physical condition of the senses in idiots.

Miss Teisen regards the sight and hearing of feeble-minded children as the senses most frequently defective. She thinks sight the most important sense to develop, and that most easily developed. She feels assured of development in other directions as soon as the idea of color dawns upon the child's mind. According to her experience, the development of one sense is accompanied by improvement of the other senses. And yet exceptional cases have presented themselves to her notice where the development of one sense has seemed to leave the other stationary. Miss Teisen has: found it impossible to reach the moral sense without a fair development of the physical senses. Improvement of the physical senses has been usually shown to improve the habits and manners. A child that distinguishes sound and appreciates music will not be so likely to howl and scream, and a child that feels the influence of color is far less inclined to tear its clothes.

Miss Teisen makes one statement of unusual interest. She says that many of the children of lowest grade have perfect sight, which their minds can not use. This very striking announcement opens the way to the question as to whether the structure of the image-field of sight, together with both that of afferent and efferent nervous fibers (the carriers to and from the brain) may not in many cases be approximately perfect, and the great and