and the spark of consciousness and intelligence which has been fanned
into momentary brightness darkens at the slightest relaxation of the
teacher's exertions. The names of objects presented to him must
sometimes be repeated hundreds of times before he can learn them. Yet
the patience and enthusiasm of the teacher are rewarded by a progress,
slow and unequal, but still marked and manifest. Step by step, often
compelled to turn back and go over the inch of ground he had gained, the
idiot is still creeping forward; and by almost imperceptible degrees his
sick, cramped, and prisoned spirit casts off the burden of its body of
death, breath as from the Almighty--is breathed into him, and he becomes
a living soul.

After the senses of the idiot are trained to take note
of their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are next
to be exercised. The greatest possible number of facts are to be
gathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse of
memory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw the
material of general ideas. It has been found difficult, if not
impossible, to teach the idiot to read by the letters first, as in the
ordinary method; but while the varied powers of the three letters, h, a,
t, could not be understood by him, he could be made to comprehend the
complex sign of the word hat, made by uniting the three.

The moral nature of the idiot needs training and development as well as
his physical and mental. All that can be said of him is, that he has the
latent capacity for moral development and culture. Uninstructed and left
to himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, of
decency and delicacy of affection and social relations. The germs of
these ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity,
undoubtedly exist in him; but there can be no growth without patient and