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Although totally blind, Dr. Irwin traveled alone extensively, by air and by rail, and he seemed physically inexhaustible. He had a keen sense of humor, which helped him and us through occasional difficult and troubled waters.

He had set his heart on writing, after his retirement, a history of work for the blind, which he planned to call Fifty Years of Progress, in which he had, indeed, played a tremendously important part. Unfortunately, after writing the ten chapters contained in this brief volume, he was suddenly stricken and called to the Great Beyond, so that the book which he contemplated was not completed.

These chapters are published in his memory and as a slight tribute to the magnificent projects which he envisioned and brought to fruition for the benefit of his fellow-blind. In view of the fact that the book was not finished, it seemed fitting to change the title, which Dr. Irwin had chosen, to As I Saw It.

M. C. MIGEL, Chairman of the Board
AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR THE BLIND

THE WAR OF THE DOTS

The long struggle to achieve a uniform type for the blind will be remembered by anyone who was active in work for the blind in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth. At the height of the struggle, one outstanding educator of the blind, Dr. Olin H. Burritt, said of the situation, "The conflict was acrimonious in the extreme. The bitterness can hardly be imagined."

Dr. Irwin, although too young to be involved in the first violent battles, was a spectator watching and waiting for his turn. He soon became an active participant in the deliberations, and finally, he was in the forefront among the American delegation that successfully brought about the establishment of Standard English braille for all English-speaking countries in London in 1932.

These developments made Dr. Irwin feel that his history of work for the blind must begin with the story of the development of a uniform type for the blind, even though his plans for the book had certain limitations as to the period of time to be covered.

Social workers often complain that blind people are a difficult lot to deal with. When one considers how cheerfully most of them have adjusted themselves within the span of a single lifetime to such changes in their reading codes as from Boston linetype to New York Point, New York Point to American braille, American braille to Revised braille grade 1 1/2, and finally from grade 1 1/2 to grade 2, it must be admitted that sweet reasonableness must characterize a large percentage of finger readers. What an outcry would be heard in this country if the seeing public had been forced to make a similar series of accommodations!

While it is not the purpose of this book to go into history of work for the blind much before 1900, some account of the origin of types for the blind in the United States will not be out of place.

The founders of schools for the blind in this country turned to Europe for special appliances and special methods. In the early 1830's when the three mother schools for the blind were founded in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, the common type in official use on the other side of the Atlantic was embossed Roman letters more or less simplified to make them more tangible. Their virtue as compared with arbitrary codes seemed to be that they could be read by sight by the seeing teachers with no special instruction. Furthermore, it was contended that the blind people, by using a type similar to that of their seeing associates, were set less apart from the rest of the world.

While Louis Braille had already published an exposition of his dot system in 1829, it had no official standing anywhere and it is not clear that our earliest American pioneers knew anything about this code. However, in 1860, Dr. Simon Pollak, a member of the Board of the Missouri School for the Blind, who had observed the system in use in Europe, brought it back to America with him and caused it to be officially adopted by this school.

In the early 1860's William Bell Wait, a teacher and superintendent of the New York Institution for the Blind, as it was then called, realized that a considerable portion of blind children had great difficulty in learning to read embossed Roman letters and a still higher percentage of those blinded in adult life could not learn to read it at all. Accordingly, he turned his attention to the promotion of some dot code that would be more tangible. In Philadelphia, Roman letters printed with dotted lines were being used to some extent, but it was not practical for blind people to write embossed Roman letters whether smooth or dotted.

Mr. Wait writes that he first asked the heads of schools for the blind in Boston and Philadelphia to join him in supplanting the Roman letters with Braille's code which was in use at the Missouri School for the Blind in St. Louis. As he received no encouragement from his colleagues he turned his attention to the perfecting of a dot code which he felt would be even superior to braille and published it in 1868.