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space must intervene between two points applied simultaneously to the person elsewhere, before we can discern them as two; they may approach very closely, and yet be separated in sensation by the fingers. This sense can, by special cultivation, when other senses are wanting, be made so much more perfect than it now is, be so filled and rounded out with instantaneous judgments, as to have but a slight resemblance to its former self. The raised letters of the blind are distinguished by most persons slowly and with the utmost difficulty, while the trained touch glides rapidly along them, almost as the visual nerve moves over the printed page. The blind in some instances acquire a power and precision of touch inexplicable to us, and are enabled to carry on employments, like engineering and warfare, from which we should regard them as entirely excluded. Ziska was among the more distinguished of generals. When the entire mind is directed to this avenue of communication with the external world, it brings it by included judgments to an unthought of perfection, and widens it into a wonderful inlet of information.

The most remarkable development of this lower sense is offered in the case of Laura Bridgman. "In 1837 a delicate, light-haired girl, nearly eight years old, who at the age of twenty-six months had lost sight, hearing, and to a great extent the senses of smell and taste, from an attack of scarlet fever, was brought from her home in New Hampshire to the Perkins Institution for the Blind, in Boston."* A mind of great vigor was here cut off almost wholly from the external world, by walls of separation unpierced by the ordinary senses. In spite of these difficulties, her powers were awakened to complete activity, and put in comparatively full communication with the outside world by means of the one remaining sense of touch. Nothing could better

* See an article on Mind, No. 14.