One of the best private deaf and dumb institutions in France is at Lyons. It contains a good number of pupils of both sexes, and its director is, or was until recently, M. Claudius Forestier, a very distinguished deaf-mute; his wife, a highly educated person—the speech-endowed daughter of the deaf-mute founder of the school—acting as directress.
The number of deaf-mutes in France has been approximately estimated at 25,000; and here, as in nearly all countries where statistics are published, it is found that the male sufferers are decidedly more numerous than the female.
To each establishment, public or private, workrooms are attached, conducted by competent instructors, and in which all the pupils, poor or rich, serve an apprenticeship to some profession, art, or trade which will one day enable them to[{201}] earn a subsistence. No longer, therefore, is the community encumbered by deaf and dumb idlers; the men and women thus afflicted leading active lives as shoemakers, dressmakers, tailors, sempstresses, locksmiths, compositors and even painters and sculptors.
A WARD IN THE ST. LOUIS HOSPITAL.
THE REPAIRING ROOM, ST. LOUIS HOSPITAL.
It has been complained that the deaf and dumb institutions of France—about fifty in number—are insufficient for the instruction of 25,000 deaf-mutes, many of whom must consequently be deprived of instruction in those employments for which they are generally as apt as their neighbours who can speak and hear.
The question of the hereditary nature of muteness has been a good deal discussed by French experts. “Dumbness,” says Ferdinand Berthier, “far from being a necessary result of deafness, simply follows the latter by reason of a natural sequence. Whether deaf-muteness dates from birth or from some accident, it has been proved in the present day that the vocal apparatus of the deaf-mute and that of a speaking person are with rare exceptions equally well organised. A prejudice still too widely spread in the world, and worthy of every effort towards its destruction, is that deaf-muteness is infallibly transmitted from father or mother to child; when on all sides we see deaf-mutes, married between themselves or to speaking spouses, constantly producing children who both hear and speak, and[{202}] in no way share the parental infirmity. Those arts which have enabled the sublimest efforts of genius to dazzle the world do not, in our opinion, merit greater attention from scholars and philosophers than the method which shall open to the deaf-mutes a road leading to intellectual labour and to the full enjoyment of civil and political rights.”