Address delivered at the New-York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, December 2d, 1846 / By Harvey P. Peet, A. M., president of the Institution. With an appendix containing the proceedings at the dedication of the chapel.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address delivered at the New-York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, December 2d, 1846 / By Harvey P. Peet, A. M., president of the Institution. With an appendix containing the proceedings at the dedication of the chapel. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/42 (page 8)
    which the citizens and the public servants have never re¬ fused a favorable hearing to the claims of the unfortunate, call for renewed expressions of devout gratitude to Him, by whose continued favor and blessing, the Institution has grown from the small and feeble beginnings which some of you remember, to its present eminence of reputation and of usefulness; and it will deepen our feelings of thankfulness to retrace, as far as time will permit, the causes which led to its establishment; the more important steps in its progress, and its present condition. I need not tell you that the possibility of instructing the deaf and dumb, is comparatively a modern discovery. In ancient times, philosophers pronounced them incapable of mental or moral improvement; the civil law placed them on a footing with idiots, and the multitude regarded them as monuments of the divine displeasure, having the form without the faculties of man. Painful it is to reflect, how many of our fellow-beings, gifted with no weak or inferior faculties, and with an organization defective only in the auditory ap¬ paratus, were, by a blind and unhappy prejudice, thrust out from political and social privileges, and even from the ties of family affection, and cut olf from the consolations of religion freely offered to the most wretched of the family of man, and inaccessible to them alone. The first successful attempts to instruct the deaf and dumb, of which we have any record, date back a little more than two centuries and a half. From the latter part of the six¬ teenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, we meet, here and there, a man of benevolence and scientific research, who, urged in some cases, by personal affection, in othefk, by the love of philosophical experiment, has left a brief ac¬ count of his successful labors in behalf of a few deaf mutes. In many cases, these early instructors commenced their task,