ial, directive effort on the part of the
mother. She can lead her little one to oo-oo, and ee-ee, and mamma, and
bub-bub, etc., by doing these babblings herself while the baby is in her
arms and his tiny hands are wandering over her lips and face and throat.
These exercises will gradually bring a recognition on the part of the
child of the sensation of vibration that accompanies voice, and they
will give facility, coupled with the normal and natural intonations that
have been acquired when he was not conscious of any effort, that will
prepare him for a better and more fluent speech when the time comes for
more exact articulation training.

But during the first two or three years of the child's life the
principal stress should be placed upon his learning to understand what
is said to him, without bothering much about his speaking himself. In
the case of the hearing child, the understanding of language comes
before he can himself utter it. This must also be the case with the deaf
child, and the period preceding utterance must be longer, by reason of
his handicap, than in the case of a child with normal hearing.

V

DEVELOPING THE MENTAL FACULTIES

By the time he is two years old he has gained maturity and grasp enough
to play many little educational games with his mother and his little
brothers and sisters, or playmates. These games should be calculated to
develop his various faculties, his powers of observation, memory, and
concentration. To develop a faculty is really _to train the brain_. As a
matter of fact, we see and hear and taste and smell and feel with our
brains. The eye of a two-year-old child is practically as perfect an
optical instrument as the eye of a boy of ten, and yet how much more the
older boy seems to see. This is because his brain has been trained to
_interpret_ the impressions that even the baby eyes received but did not
understand. Of course, where the instrument is found to be imperfect we
can assist it by means of additional lenses, or perhaps by some one of
the skillful operations now performed by oculists, and, as the sight is
of such increased importance to a deaf child, the greatest care and
watchfulness should be given to his eyes. Do not let him sleep, or lie,
facing the sun, or any other powerful light, but throughout his life be
careful that all his use of eyesight be under conditions of ample and
well-directed light. Supposing that the simple tests referred to
heretofore hav