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A LITTLE more than twenty years ago, there was no educational establishment for idiots in the United States; now there are two in New York, two in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut (recently liberally endowed by the late Philip Maret), one in Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, one in Kentucky, one in Illinois -- at least nine in all, where above one thousand children are under instruction.

An idea of these institutions may be formed by visiting the NewYork State Asylum for Idiots, which is a public charity, and the School for Feeble-minded Children, at Barre, Mass., which is private and self-supporting. Both were created by the same man.

Twenty-one years ago, Dr. Hervey B. Wilbur, then a physician at Barre, Mass., undertook the novel and perilous enterprise of attaching his own fortunes and those of his young family to the task of educating idiot children. He had no predecessor in this undertaking in this country, and he was sustained in his good work, against the forebodings and ridicule of friends and neighbors, only by the bravery of his wife.

After a few years, during which the young couple gave uninterrupted attention to their pupils, even to the extent of keeping the most helpless in their own bedroom, Dr. Wilbur was called, first, to Albany, and subsequently (when the State Asylum was erected) to Syracuse, there to organize the State institution for this helpless class; and was succeeded at Barre by Dr. George Brown, under whose careful and able management that school has attained its present high standing.

These two establishments demand a separate notice, because they are in some respect types of two classes of institutions, of two systems of physiological training, and of two wants unequally satisfied in our present organization.

The New-York State Asylum for Idiots was founded by an act of the New-York Legislature, dated July 10, 1851; and, at every session since, that body has voted an appropriation in its behalf. It is situated on one of those alternately green and white knolls which form a natural amphitheatre, whence the eye looks down to the wonderful growth of the "city of salt," Syracuse, below. Among, the curling smoke of iron, glass, pottery, and other furnaces, above the sea of vats brimful of brine, stands the asylum-a tall and elegant building in the Italian style, surrounded by tasteful grounds, flanked by stables and farm-houses, extending its fields right and left, and its pleasant groves-summer resorts of the children-over a tract fifty acres in extent.

The main building is compact and well arranged, containing, as usual, the apartments of the officers, as well as the living and training accommodations for a hundred and fifty pupils, the usual number in attendance. It contains also, what can hardly be found elsewhere, a library of school-books and of works on metaphysics, psychology, physiology, and nervous pathology, expressly selected to aid in the elucidation of the problems which occur in the treatment of nervous anomalies, and in the education of a class of children who are certainly not susceptible of education by any other system than that of physiological training.

In planning this institution, Dr. Wilbur had no model for reference, nothing but books and theories. It was the first asylum ever expressly built for idiots. His practical knowledge of their wants during the previous two or three years, and his remarkable mechanical skill and peculiar sense of the fitness of things, enabled him to overcome in an extraordinary degree the architectural difficulties in the construction of such a building. Idiotic children require more room, more air, more light, snore warmth, than other children; all these, and especially the greater amount of room, which is indispensable in any attempt at improving these weak and sluggish natures, he provided for them. The pupils of the asylum are of both sexes, and in age range from seven years to twenty; they are chosen from a much larger number of applicants, in view of their possible improvement with the means there at command. Those who are absolutely helpless, either on account of restlessness, immobility, or accessory disease, must, of course, be rejected, since, if received, they would either be neglected, or each one would monopolize the entire time of an attendant, while the State appropriation will not permit more than one nurse or attendant to five or six children.

The pupils remain in the institution as long as there is visible improvement and progress; for, though nominally an asylum, it is really a training-school. (1) On admission, a description of the antecedents and existing condition of each pupil is entered on the records; and in every case sufficient freedom is allowed the child, to let him show his capacities, peculiarities, and tendencies. The study of these serves as a basis for his assignment to a particular group. This assignment of the child to his appropriate group or class is a step which requires remarkable discernment and thorough knowledge of the peculiarities of idiots; for the child may need to be with children of about the same development with himself, or with those who are further advanced, in order to stimulate his ambition; he may require to be with few or with many, with those who are too quiet, in order to calm down his excessive excitability; or with the restless ones, to rouse his more sluggish nature, etc., etc. He may also need to change from one group to another, either in consequence of his progress, or to subject him to a different mode of training.

This grouping introduces the subject of education; and what can be more interesting to the mind than the process by which another mind is let out or freed from the bondage and fetters which have hitherto imprisoned it? The success may be but partial; but it is absolute, so far as it goes.

The first problem is to disengage and develop the mind of an idiot, which has hitherto been as if hidden beneath the useless muscles and the insensate nerves, components of his weak and inefficient body. The second problem, though by no means the last, is to apply this partially-liberated intellect to the acquisition of useful knowledge and good habits.

These ends are accomplished, in Syracuse, by a series of agencies whose key is in the hand of the superintendent, and whose movements are intrusted alternately and unceasingly to attendants, gymnasts, and teachers. The idiots (Idioc means isolated) are not for a moment let alone. From morning till night they are led from one mode of activity to another -- seated only to rest, and constantly working out their own progress through experimental and lively teachings. Early in the morning, as soon as dressed and fed, these children of the neant begin to do something. From half hour to half hour, they pass from singing or hearing music to exercises of locomotion, standing, training of the hand to prehension, imitation, feeling; then the errors of the senses are corrected, their modes of perception improved in quickness or accuracy, and raised progressively to phenomena more and more intellectual. The speech, its concordance with actions, the movements performed on command, the exercise of the will through obedience, the morality of labor, of partaking of food, of helping relations to each other, of pleasure and pain, all these exercises have a very different moral, intellectual, and hygienic result from those obtained in schools where book, child, and chair, are screwed together three hours at a time, or in reformatories where children drive the same kind of peg in the same kind of sole from morning to night, from day to day, etc.

"But," does the reader ask, "are not reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., taught also?" Oh, yes. Dr. Wilbur has provided abundantly for instruction in these, and has devised and procured much apparatus to aid in the matter, and all the children, so far as they can, acquire a knowledge of these studies. Some become, after a time, remarkable proficients in penmanship; and one, occasionally, in geography, or in the rapid combinations or evolutions of numbers, astonishing even skilful, teachers by his readiness on these subjects; but the majority profit more by the physiological than by the mental training; they are decidedly poor scholars, and are only proficient in kindness, honesty, and love of labor proportionate to their power.

This seemingly small success is really very great, when we compare it with the original incapacity of idiots. Dr. Wilbur has attained it by his superior administrative capacity, his tact in choosing, commanding, and keeping his helpers, but more than all by his adherence to physiological training. Without group-teaching, he could not have taught so many idiots with so few subordinates; without the incitement of systematic imitation, he could not have developed wills where even instincts were scarcely to be discovered; without sensorial exercises, he could not have accumulated distinct sensations pabulum for comparison and judgment; without general gymnastics, he could not have rendered human the balanced animal gait; and, without special gymnastics, he could never have given precision to localized movement, nor restored the paw-like hand of the idiot to the exalted place assigned it by Galen, at the summit of the creation, on a level with the brain itself. This, at least, Dr. Wilbur has done, and is doing every year better and better for the idiot children of the New York State Asylum.

II.

TURN we now to Barre, and see what Dr. George Brown has accomplishled for a class of children of similarly incomplete development, but of wealthier parentage. Though I had expected to find a marked difference between a State and a private institution, yet the contrast was even greater than I had anticipated.

Leaving the Boston and Albany Railway at Brookfield, we rode among the hills of central Massachusetts to Barre, which we found a scattered village, and its institution for idiots a dis-collection of elegant or well-appointed buildings. It is situated on a broad and healthy plateau, ensconced in trees. You come upon it suddenly; without preliminary approaches, you have before you a shallow and large basin of flowers set in raised margins of rich velvety turf, served to the surprised senses like a repast of scent and colors, guarded by stately evergreens trimmed after the manner of Versailles, and fronted to the left by the principal building, whose steps, columns, architraves, and galleries, rise above each other in Vitruvian ordonnance.

In this mansion, sanctified by its present use, Dr. Brown and his family reside, and within hearing-distance are the rooms assigned to the worst cases of bodily and mental infirmity, so that none can suffer without being heard either by Dr. or Mrs. Brown, whose care and watchfulness over the welfare of all under their charge is constant and all-engrossing. The other buildings are occupied by other pupils and their attendants, according to their fortune and the treatment which may be necessary; to each building are attached all necessary conveniences, gardens, walks, etc.; the new building, recently completed under Dr. Brown's supervision, surpasses the rest in the completeness and perfection of its accommodations. With such ample provisions as these for the comfort of its inmates, the institution of Barre fulfils its twofold object-being a school for those who can improve, a retreat for those who cannot.

Here the training and nursing of individuals is as strictly carried out as the general training is at Syracuse. Private apartments, servants, horses, carriages, or any other comfort, may be indulged in, which is beneficial to the pupils and within the limits of their means. There are many benefits, as we shall see presently, derived from this somewhat large liberty.

There are at Barre about fifty patients brought from all parts of the country. How many of these are offshoots from some kind of aristocracy, miserable sprouts dried up with paralysis, softened by imbecility, shaken by the St. Vitus's dance, epilepsy, and what else that may befall haughty and empty families for believing themselves above the brotherhood of man, the universal family of patient workers, God alone knows. Mrs. Brown, whose opportunities for gathering observations in. regard to children of this class have been greater than those of any other person now living, remarked to me that these children of endless siestas and satieties, or of moneyed and sensualistic indulgences, differed materially from those made idiotic by local influences, home-privations, and motherly suffering during pregnancy; the former presenting more variety, the latter more uniformity in their symptoms.

It was already empirically known that some idiots can be better improved by general training (a kind of attraction), and some by individual training (a kind of incubation, if I may call it so). The fitness of either exclusively, or of its preponderance in the educational process, was presumed from observation of the functional anomalies, and, in doubtful cases, a trial of both methods was resorted to, to determine which was best. Diagnosis is rendered more easy by the new criterion just laid down, and a rational diversity of treatment may be insisted upon, almost from the start, to the benefit of the pupils and to the more complete satisfaction of the teachers, since they will the better understand their task.

The part of this task mostly insisted upon at Barre is, for the reasons assigned above, the individual training. Sexes being separated, varieties and even individuals in some cases being kept apart, the school and gymnasium do not, of course, present as lively an appearance as they do in a State institution. But on an examination of these smaller groups, or of the single idiots engaged either with a teacher or with a child of higher grade than themselves, you can easily discern the character of this individual training. It is the training of deficient functions by the immediate action of the teacher on the child. But, lest this definition should itself seem obscure, I will illustrate it by some examples of the method actually pursued in Barre. One of these has reference to imitation, which, after instinct, is the first lever of instruction for the idiot. Imitation, in its varied forms, opens the way to instruction proper. By it every member of the body, as well as the body as a whole, is drilled to regular action; the hands, in particular, are repeatedly trained to take all those positions which will be required in the acts of ordinary life or in the course of education. By it children, whose whole gait and manner is stiff and unyielding, or who are restless or immovable, are in more than one sense rebuilt into human shape and for ready usefulness. Under the same individual incubation-like training, sensorial gymnastics extend the sphere of knowledge, at the same time that they perform the more important function of increasing the modes of vitality from without to within: as the sap comes up the tree from under the bark, so the blunted surfaces of the idiot are taught to circulate the feelings. The touch is developed by a series of tactile impressions, in which the pupil is told nothing, shown nothing, but made to feel extremely opposite properties of matter by contact alone. In other exercises it is the sight or hearing which is trained to perceive, unaided, impressions more and more delicate. Sometimes the exercises tend to develop the accuracy of feeling, sometimes to increase the rapidity of perception. By one series of exercises, one set of apparatus, the ultimate nerve-fibrils (innumerable and infinitesimal brains of the periphery) have their sensibility exalted; by other exercises, another set, the white conductors (or wires) are taught to forward in normal time a dispatch from the periphery to the central office of registration of impressions, etc. The improvement in these processes is capable of positive measurement, since, at the beginning, some idiots require several seconds to transmit an impression from without within, or a volition or order from within without, whereas the normal time for these operations is only 1/25th of a second for the former operation, and 1/25th for the latter. Thus the progress of sensation, perception, volition, and even self-control, may become susceptible of mathematical measurement, just in proportion as the method of physiological education is rendered more positive by the precision of those who apply it.

Here the question naturally arises: When inert children are, year after year, provoked to vitality in all its modes from without within; when, by this slow process, they are progressively made to act, to feel, to speak, to will -- some a little, some more, some like ordinary men -- what part has the brain taken in this transfiguring revolution? It received the impressions, it acted on the spur of external stimuli, it remained for a variable time as passive as a muscle whose contraction shall depend upon the excitation to contractility either of a centripetal or of a centrifugal nerve. But, so far the encephalon did not give any evidence of spontaneity, its functional development took effect by continued impulsion from the periphery to the centre; a centripetal process, during which the cerebrum sent nothing to the outer world, but the outer world sent every thing to it from the peripheric feelers through the nerve-cords. This attitude does not look like the supreme autocracy assumed for the brain. The nervous system would seem rather like an informal republic, where the presiding officer is vested with great powers, which he exercises when he has learned what they are and when he can assume them, but mean time any one is at liberty to take the initiative who possesses the ability. Thence might be concluded that, at least practically, the centre of the nervous system, at any time, is at that point, be it where it may, in which its concentrated irritability produces its principal action.

This conclusion, deduced from the physiological training of idiots, corroborates the position taken by several recent anatomists and physiologists, whose discoveries and experiments tend to increase our estimation of the role played in the human organism by the pneumo-gastric and sympathetic systems and by the minor ganglia and peripheric nervous element, lowering to some extent the assumed omnipotence of the brain proper in the psychical domain. In this respect, as in several others, the treatment of idiots has proved that its fundamental doctrine lay deep in positive knowledge, and that, even in its infancy, it can be called to offer valuable and important testimony in questions relative to the progress of the correlation of sciences.

I began this paper as I entered the institutions for idiots, thinking only of their modes of improvement; but the philosophy of the subject has carried me far from the more particular description I had intended of the method adopted for the regeneration of these unfortunate creatures, the offspring of our sufferings or our excesses; let me, in closing, recur for a moment to these institutions.

I have endeavored to convey an idea of the differences which do and must exist between a public and a private school for idiots. Both have been opened for the same class of children, and treat them by the same method, applied in both by the choicest women. In this they are alike; in every thing else they differ. Let us see:

A. The State institution is but a school where idiots are received, if they can improve, and kept as long as they do improve.

B. In it, the physiological treatment is applied mostly to groups, the children, constantly in contact, being raised up from idiocy by the incessant action of the whole on each.

C. The sexes are completely separated in the dormitories and gymnasium -- not always at recess. They take together their meals, lessons, walks, musical exercises, dancing, and other evening entertainments.

On the other hand:

A. The private institution is a school for the young and improving idiot, and a life-long retreat for the hopeless cases.

B. In it, the physiological method is applied to a pupil by a teacher, who carries him (with exclusive regard for his individuality) from instinctive to intellectual operations, through personal imitation, etc.

C. The inmates live in separate buildings; boys and girls have their grounds, schools, teachers, matrons, attendants, etc., apart. Some even eat and are taught in their own rooms; the best of them only take their meals with the doctor's family, and enjoy evening games.

To sum up, it is difficult to understand, unless by sight, how the same thing can be done so well, and yet so differently, as it is at Syracuse and at Barre. It is a pleasure and a duty to bestow upon them both, in their present condition of efficiency, unreserved praise. Had it been my good fortune to visit the training schools for idiots in other States, I have no doubt that I should have found them equally worthy of commendation. Did space permit, I should have desired also to speak of the services rendered to the cause of the physiological training of idiots by organizers like Dr. Joseph Parrish and his accomplished wife; by teachers like Misses Young and Wood, who count at least sixteen years of active service in Syracuse; and by authors like Dr. L. P. Brockett, whose essays and cyclopaedic articles on idiocy have diffused more sympathy for idiots and more knowledge of the best modes of training them, throughout this country, than has been attempted in Europe.