Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial

Subjects:

Disability, Degeneration, Education, Animal Behaviour, Analogy

People mentioned:

Samuel G Howe

    Reflects that blindness casts a child into an 'unspeakable sense of solitude, the young soul shrinks and wastes; the human child sinks towards the brute' and ends his days in a condition of 'mental barbarism' and 'imbecility'. Reports, however, that Michael Anagnos's 'experiment of the Kindergarten for the blind [at the Perkins Institute for the Blind, Boston], as far as it has been tried, is most successful. The result is inspiring' (804). Also suggests that a 'pleasant paper in a recent number of the Magazine of Popular Science [that] describes the flight of some arctic birds at certain seasons [which] darken the air, it says, and fill it with a murmuring sound' will 'doubtless recall to the Autocrat [i.e. Oliver W Holmes], and all who like him have climbed the height where Fame's proud temple shines afar, the flight of the autograph seekers' who incessantly flock around them (807).