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A year of patient endeavour has nevertheless wrought a wonderful change in the condition of this miserable being. Cold bathing, rubbing of the limbs, exercise of the muscles, exposure to the air, and other appliances, have enabled him to stand upright, to sit at table and feed himself, and chew his food, and to walk about with slight assistance. His habits are no longer those of a brute; he observes decency, his eye is brighter, his cheeks glow with health, his countenance is more expressive of thought. He has learned many words, and constructs simple sentences; his affections begin to develop; and there is every prospect that he will be so far renovated as to be able to provide for himself in manhood.

In the case of another boy, aged twelve years, the improvement has been equally remarkable. The gentleman who first called attention to him, in a recent note to Dr. Howe, published in the report, thus speaks of his present condition:

"When I remember his former wild and almost frantic demeanor when approached by any one, and the apparent impossibility of communicating with him, and now see him standing in his class, playing with his fellows, and willingly and familiarly approaching me, examining what I give, and when I see him already selecting articles named by his teacher, and even correctly pronouncing the words printed on cards -- improvement does not convey the idea presented to my mind -- it is creation -- it is making him anew."

All the pupils have, more or less, advanced. Their health and habits have improved, and there is no reason to doubt that the experiment, at the close of its three years will be found to have been quite as successful as its most sanguine projectors could have anticipated. Dr. Howe has been ably seconded by an accomplished teacher, James B. Richards, who has devoted his whole time to the pupils. Of the nature and magnitude of their task, an idea may be formed only by considering the utter listlessness of idiocy -- the incapability of the poor pupil to fix his attention upon anything, and his general want of susceptibility to impressions. All his senses are dulled and perverted. Touch, hearing, sight, smell, are all more or less defective. His gluttony is unaccompanied with the gratification of taste -- the most savory viands and the offal which he shares with the pigs equally satisfy him. His mental state is still worse than his physical. Thought is painful and irksome to him. His teacher can only engage his attention by strenuous efforts, loud earnest tones, gesticulations and signs, and a constant presentation of some visible object of bright colour and striking form. The eye wanders, and the spark of consciousness and intelligence, which has been formed into momentary brightness, darkens at the slightest relaxations of the teacher's exertions. The names of the objects presented to him must 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 persevering culture. Where this is afforded, to use the language of the report, "the idiot may learn what love is, though he may not know the word which expresses it; he may feel kindly affections while unable to understand the simplest virtuous principle; and he may begin to live acceptably to God before he has learned the name by which men call Him."

In the facts and statistics presented in the report, light is shed upon some of the dark pages of God's providence, and it is seen that the suffering and shame of idiocy are the result of sin, of the violation of the merciful laws of God, and the harmonies of his benign order. The penalties which are ordained for the violators of natural laws are inexorable and certain. For the transgressor of the laws of life there is, as in the case of Esau, "no place for repentance, though he seek it earnestly and with tears." The curse cleaves to him and his children. In this view, how important becomes the subject of the hereditary transmission of moral and physical disease and debility, and how necessary it is that there should be a clearer understanding of, and a willing obedience, at any cost, to the eternal law which makes the parent the blessing or the curse of the child, giving strength and beauty, and the capacity to know and do the will of God, or bequeathing loathsomeness and deformity and animal appetite, incapable of the restraints of moral faculties? Even if the labors of Dr. Howe and his benevolent associates do not materially lessen the amount of present actual evil and suffering in this respect, they will not be put forth in vain, if they have the effect of calling the public attention to the great laws of our being, the violation of which has made this goodly earth a great lazar-house of pain and sorrow.