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"At this time I was so fortunate as to hear of the child, and immediately hastened to Hanover, to see her. I found her with a well-formed figure; a strongly-marked, nervous-sanguine temperament; a large and beautifully-shaped head, and the whole system in healthy action.

"Here seemed a rare opportunity of benefiting an individual, and of trying a plan for the education of a deaf and blind person, which I had formed on seeing Julia Brace, at Hartford. (9)

"The parents were easily induced to consent to her coming to Boston; and on the fourth of October, 1837, they brought her to the Institution. For a while, she was much bewildered. After waiting about two weeks, until she became acquainted with her new locality, and somewhat familiar with the inmates, the attempt was made to give her a knowledge of arbitrary signs, by which she could interchange thoughts with others."

As further illustrative of this stage of Laura's development, I here interpolate from a later report of my father's

Some Thoughts on Language

"I hold that all human beings have the innate disposition, capacity, and desire to attach a sign to everything cognizable by their senses; to every thought which occurs to their minds; to every emotion which moves their spirit; and this sign must be by some outward form of expression cognizable by other persons.

"Tribes emerging from a condition like that of the brutes, use perhaps only audible cries, and visible signs; but all people, as they rise out of savagedom and pass through barbarism, follow the instinct or disposition to express themselves by audible sounds, and begin to use arbitrary and more or less perfectly organized language, in some of its thousand forms. All come to speak, as a matter of course; and the acquisition of speech is the crowning acquisition in human development. Vocal speech, be it remarked, is not the result of any conscious purpose and effort. Men, moved by the disposition and desire to have a system for mutual expression of desire and thought, do not select audible speech as one of many conceivable modes of carrying out this intercourse of minds; but all adopt speech because it is the one contemplated by nature, and for which they have organs specially fitted.

"I knew that Laura must have this innate desire and disposition; and that, although by reason of lack of sight and hearing she could not follow it in the usual way, and imitate the sounds made by others, and so speak, she would readily adopt any substitute which should be made comprehensible to her in her dark and still abode.

"In this faith I acted; and by holding to it firmly, succeeded. Without the belief, and indeed the certainty, that the mind of Laura was endowed with some attributes which the most highly gifted brutes utterly lack, I should not have attempted to bring her out of her mental darkness into light, any more than I should have attempted to bring out the mind of my dog Bruno, which seemed to know as much as Laura then did; and which I loved and prized, almost as much as if he had been human."

I return to the ninth Report.

"There was one of two ways to be adopted: either to go on and build up a language of signs on the basis of the natural language which she had already herself commenced; or to teach her the purely arbitrary language in common use: that is, to give her a sign for every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters, by the combination of which she might express her idea of the existence, and the mode and condition of existence, of anything. The former would have been easy, but very ineffectual; the latter seemed very difficult, but, if accomplished, very effectual. I determined, therefore, to try the latter.

"The first experiments were made by taking articles in common use, such as knives, forks, spoons, keys, etc., and pasting upon them labels with their names in raised letters. These she felt of very carefully, and soon, of course, distinguished that the crooked lines spoon differed as much from the crooked lines key, as the spoon differed from the key in form.

"Then small detached labels, with the same words printed upon them, were put into her hands; and she soon observed that they were similar to the ones pasted on the articles. She showed her perception of this similarity by laying the label key upon the key, and the label spoon upon the spoon. She was here encouraged by the natural sign of approbation, patting on the head.