Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/664

646 St. Stephen's Church in Philadelphia, and Mr. Adam Geibel, composer and organist of the Baptist Temple at Broad and Berks Streets, Philadelphia, and of the John B. Stetson Chapel, at Fourth and Columbia Avenues in the same city.

Prescott the historian and Huber the naturalist were both blind.

The following remarkable instances of deaf persons, many of them congenitally so, who are practicing professions, and depending entirely upon lip-reading for their understanding of conversation, was prepared by a gentleman connected with an institution for the deaf, whose name I am not at liberty to give.

A Columbus paper has published some accounts of the stone-deaf Ohio lawyer, in full practice, who depends absolutely upon lip-reading, and who has tried cases in Columbus courts. For twelve years now, Mr. N. B. Lutes, of Tiffin, Ohio, has depended entirely upon lip-reading to do all that any lawyer does for his clients in court and in every phase of the practice of the law.

The latest issue of the Missouri Deaf-Mute Record gives an account of a lady who reads the lips of ministers and public speakers. Mr. Alexander Hunter, of the United States Land Office, in Washington, D. C, is "deaf as an adder." Though far from perfect in lip-reading, he has read one hundred and fifty words "given out" from the dictionary without making a mistake. He has read the lips of Beecher and Booth almost faultlessly, and has greatly enjoyed pulpit and platform orators and some of the great actors, the chief drawback in reading their lips being the shifting of their positions on the stage, so that their lips were at times invisible.

Mitchell, the chemist, an examiner in the United States Patent Office, graduated from the Clarke Institute, Northampton, Mass., and, though a poor lip-reader, graduated from the Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic School as an analytical chemist.

For many years a totally deaf man has occupied a place in the United States Civil Service, receiving his first appointment on the strength of admirable papers in the civil-service examination. Notwithstanding his infirmity, thanks to his lip-reading, he took the regular course at a great university, recited with his classmates, attended lectures, and secured his degree. I doubt if president or professors knew that he was a deaf man. Certainly some of his classmates did not know it. For business reasons his deafness is kept secret, and a keen newspaper man went through the office in which he was employed a few years ago in search of a deaf clerk, and failed to find such a man or any one who knew of the existence of such a case in that department.

This, of course, is an extraordinary case, but probably none more so than that of Miss Salter (see Annals of Volta Institute,