erpretation of the
information furnished by these senses. Diderot says, "the help which our
senses reciprocally afford to each other, hinders their improvement,"
and so the person in possession of all the senses regards the blind man
as a marvel of intelligence and skill, just because, on losing his
eyesight, his remaining senses come to the rescue, and he continues to
live and move and have his being without the most precious of all
physical senses. In the world of the blind child eyesight plays no part,
and so the other senses are made to do double duty, and the extent to
which these may be cultivated is limited only by the mentality of the
child, its early training and environment.

I think hearing is the first sense to be cultivated, both in the infant
and the adult suddenly deprived of eyesight. Through its ears, the child
recognizes voices, detects different footfalls, is enabled to measure
distance with a fair degree of accuracy, and can form a very clear idea
as to the shape and dimensions of a room. All this information is
conveyed to the normal child through the eyes. Dr. Illingworth, a noted
educator of the blind in England, says: "Of course, there is no doubt
that blindness tends to a higher and more perfect development of the
sense of hearing, even in the uneducated, on the same principle that
Nature almost always comes to the aid of her children in providing
protective agencies of one kind or another, even in the very lowest
organisms, and, naturally, for those who are blind, the sense of hearing
is the first to fall back upon for this purpose. Thus it becomes more
highly developed, because there is more frequent call upon, and exercise
of, that sense." Another writer has said, "but a distinction should be
made between sensitiveness and an ability to use the sense, between
native sensory capacity of the sense organ, and the acquired ability to
use that capacity."

The second sense to be developed in the blind child is that of touch,
and this development begins at a very early date, supplementing the
sense of hearing. Long before the child is old enough to read, its
fingers have become its eyes, and each of the ten fingers carries its
quota of information to the active brain, the amount and quality of this
information increasing with the mental development. In addition to the
fingers, the nerves of the face and those of the feet contribute their
share of information. The child learns to detect differences