These pictures are correct in their outline, but the artists have not spared their colours. They will remind us, who are learned in legends, of that illusive monomania among the monks of Mount Athos, who believed that they could at pleasure attain a celestial vision by communing devoutly with the Deity, while their attention or their sight were directed to the umbilicus! And they were therefore called “Omphalopsychians.” We discover also very close analogies to this mental concentration, in the acuteness with which one sense is endowed on the failure of another. The delicacy of touch in the blind is often extreme; I knew a blind lady who played an excellent rubber, passing her finger lightly over the card spots; and more curious still are the cases of Miss M’Avoy, of Stanley the organist, and of Professor Saunderson. De Luc tells us of a lady, who read distinctly by passing her fingers over the page, even of a strange book. In Laura Bridgman, an American girl, an inmate of the Institution of Boston since 1837, the whole faculty of perception was concentrated in the one sense of touch. At the age of two, sight, and hearing, and smelling, and almost taste, deserted her. To this interesting creature, through the acuteness of her sense of touch in tracing letters, has been imparted so much knowledge, that the moral sentiments and the congenial affections of the heart are now beautifully displayed in her character. If by the dumb alphabet, or finger-talking, conversation is commenced with her, she follows the fingers with her arm with extreme rapidity, so that scarce a letter escapes her. Such are the wonders of this child’s intelligence, that her mind has been cited as illustrative of innate sentiment; but the very facility is enough to explain her actions.
Le Cat writes of a blind sculptor at Voltera, who modelled features most faithfully by the touch.
A French gentleman lost the integrity of every sense, but sensation remained in half of his face, on which he received the correspondence of his friends by their tracing on it letters or forms.
In Mr. Eschke’s establishment at Berlin, conversation was carried on by tracing letters on the clothes of the back.
A Bolognese, on witnessing a woman in acute hysteria, became occasionally convulsed, and impenetrably deaf; if, however, the slightest whisper was breathed to the pit of the stomach, he heard distinctly.
From Andral’s Lectures, to please you, Astrophel, I will select this fragment:
“I saw yesterday a young lady who has been frequently magnetized, and who, on my visit, presented some very remarkable circumstances. After a fit of indigestion she fell into the ecstatic state, in which she continued when I saw her. Her skin was perfectly insensible, and her eyes were open like animals’ in whom the fifth pair of nerves has been divided. She could perceive light, knew the difference between day and night for instance, but she could see and distinguish nothing else. She could not speak, but by signs expressed that her intellect was unusually active. But the most remarkable of the phenomena she presented was a singular exaltation of the sense of hearing. So extraordinarily delicate had this become, that she distinctly perceived sounds inaudible to myself and several other persons.”
Carus, unmindful of the existence of a state of abstract reverie resembling sleep, records the case of a young ecclesiastic, who composed sermons in a state of slumber, correcting and adding to them with peculiar care. And this is the deduction: that the sense of vision seemed to be transferred to the fingers, as the eyes were perfectly blinded to the writing paper. His eyes, when he sat for his portrait, should have been painted at the tips of his fingers.
James Mitchell, congenitally deaf and blind, discriminated his friends from strangers, and even formed a fair estimate of character, by the smell of the parties. And there was a deaf woman (writes Le Cat) who could read, and even tell the difference of languages, from the silent motion of the lip.
From these very curious illustrations we may confess that these lines in Hudibras are no fiction: