Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/76

66 of the deaf and dumb who have had no education but what comes with mere living among speaking people. Thus Massieu, the Abbé Sicard's celebrated pupil, gave an account of what he could remember of his untaught state. He loved his father and mother much, and made himself understood by them in signs. There were six deaf-and-dumb children in the family, three boys and three girls. "I stayed," he said, "at my home till I was thirteen years and nine months old, and never had any instruction; I had darkness for the letters (j'avois ténèbres pour les lettres). I expressed my ideas by manual signs or gesture. The signs which I used then, to express my ideas to my relatives and my brothers and sisters, were very different from those of the educated deaf-and-dumb. Strangers never understood us when we expressed our ideas to them by signs, but the neighbours understood us." He noticed oxen, horses, vegetables, houses, and so forth, and remembered them when he had seen them. He wanted to learn to read and write, and to go to school with the other boys and girls, but was not allowed to; so he went to the school and asked by signs to be taught to read and write, but the master refused harshly, and turned him out of the school. His father made him kneel at prayers with the others, and he imitated the joining of their hands and the movement of their lips, but thought (as other deaf-and-dumb children have done) that they were worshipping the sky. "I knew the numbers," he said, "before my instruction, my fingers had taught me them. I did not know the figures; I counted on my fingers, and when the number was over ten, I made notches in a piece of wood." When he was asked what he used to think people were doing when they looked at one another and moved their lips, he replied that he thought they were expressing ideas, and in answer to the inquiry why he thought so, he said he remembered people speaking about him to his father, and than his father threatened to have him punished.

Kruse tells a very curious story of an untaught deaf-and-dumb boy. He was found by the police wandering about Prague, in 1805. He could not make himself understood, and they could