c.—ii

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of being immediately corrected tend to become habitual. This speaking with the teacher is also very trying to the pupils. As Matter says, " Let a hearing person try it." Let him speak aloud after the speaker every word spoken to him and he will soon find how tiring it is. How much more so must it be for a deaf person who has to make use of all liis attention and his intellect, first to observe the exact arrangement of the speaker's vocal organs, and secondly to imitate the same and to produce the tone ! He can then give little attention to the meaning of the words, and after a little time he takes his attention off the latter and repeats mechanically, and his speech, so far as this repetition is concerned, ceases to be an expression of thought. The practice also tends to make the speech of the teacher and pupils unnecessarily slow, and therefore monotonous and unnatural, but its chief disadvantage is that it prevents the pupils from concentrating their mental energies on the matter of the lesson. I have referred to it at length because I observed it in use in a number of schools that I visited. Teachers have defended it by claiming for it that it ensures the attention of the whole class, and that it shows the teacher that the pupils are following what he is saying. As regards the latter point, a good teacher always knows when this is the case whether the children are repeating after him or not; and as regards the former point, it is, as I have shown, only a divided attention that is secured by this old-fashioned method. Apart from this the teaching in the French Institution is excellent and well worthy of thoughtful observation and imitation, and the text-books of M. Thollon are admirable. I may mention that at the Paris Institution I had the pleasure of meeting M. Pentelides, of Constantinople, who was sent to Paris three years ago by the Ottoman Government in order to be trained in the art of teaching the deaf by the oral method, and who is now taking up the position of Director of the new Government Institution at Constantinople. I had several long conversations with this gentleman, and was greatly impressed with his zeal and energy and with his general fitness for the difficult task, he is taking up. Au extremely interesting feature of the Institution at Paris is " La Laboratoire de la Parole," conducted by M. Marichelle, in which, besides the kinematograph, which is made use of for recording the positions of the visible organs of speech, an elaborate electrical machine, somewhat of the nature of a phonograph, is used to record visually the actual voice-vibrations. To what extent the latter may be found to be of use in the actual work of teaching speech to young deafmutes is somewhat doubtful to inc. 1 think it likely that, apart from its value as an aid to the teacher in studying the mechanism of speech, its principal utility will be found to be in assisting in the correction of errors of articulation or enunciation in deaf persons .whose intelligence has already been reached by oral instruction. The principal difference that I observed between the methods of instruction in the oral schools in England and in those on the Continent was that in the latter, particularly in Germany and in Italy, the methods appeared to me to be more oral than in the former, writing being much less used as a means of instruction in the Continental schools than was the case in England. In Herr Vatter's school at Frankfurt and in Signor Ferreri's at Milan practically the whole of the instruction is given by word of mouth, and the blackboard is very sparingly used. This I think largely accounts for the fluency of speech and the accuracy of the lip-reading in these foreign schools. One thing I noticed in the last-mentioned school appeared to me to be specially worthy of imitation. In most schools the greater part of the speech used during a lesson is used by the teacher himself, the part played by each pupil being largely confined to answering questions put to him by the teacher, with the result that at the end of a lesson each individual member of the class has uttered a very small percentage of the total words spoken during the lesson. In this particular school I was much impressed by the skill of the teacher in securing an opposite result. During the lesson a very large proportion of the speech used was used by the pupils to one another, the teacher confining himself as much as possible to the general direction of and the equalizing of this speech-work, so that at the end of the lesson he had not spoken very much more than any individual member of the class. The education of the very young deaf child was a question that received much attention at the Glasgow conference, and while there was some difference of opinion as to the advisability of making the attendance at school of such children compulsory, the general opinion appeared to be entirely in favour of commencing their education as soon as possible. It was felt that something should be done to bridge the gulf of silence and mental starvation that in the case of deaf children ordinarily reaches from infancy to the age of seven or more, and that the age at which the first lessons in language should be given to a deaf child should approximate as closely as possible to the age at which normal children learn to speak. The necessity for the instruction of parents as to the home treatment of infant deaf children was urged by several speakers, and the still stronger necessity of skilled tuition by expert teachers at an age when the vocal organs are still plastic and when the desire for oral expression is first awakened was generally conceded. Preparatory schools for young deaf children have shown such gratifying results in America and in Denmark, and more recently in England, that I strongly urge the Department to consider the question of the establishment of such a school here. It is essential that a preparatory school should be entirely separate from the main school, and that pupils should remain at it until they have some command of spoken language. One of my most pleasing experiences while at Home was a visit to the Henry Worrall Infant School at Manchester, which is very ably conducted by Miss Goldsack under the direction of Mr. W. Nelson, Superintendent of the Royal Schools for the Deaf at Manchester, of which it is a branch. It is situated about five or six minutes' walk from the main school. At the time of my visit there were about thirty pupils in residence, and the arrangements for their care and the methods of tuition struck me as admirable. Similar preparatory schools are being planned in connexion with schools in other parts of Great Britain,