Abbe de l epee biography of donald

The Abbe de l'Epee.

IT was well said, by one who has himself been a leader in one of the great philanthropic enterprises of the day, that, “ if the truthful history of any invention were written, we should find concerned in it the thinker, who dreams, without reaching the means of putting his imaginings in practice, — the mathematician, who estimates justly the forces at command, in their relation to each other, but who forgets to proportion them to the resistance to be encountered,—and so on, through the thousand intermediates between the dream and the perfect idea, till one comes who combines the result of the labor of all Iris predecessors, and gives to the invention new life, and with it his name.”

Such was the history of the movement for the education of deaf-mutes.

There had been a host of dreamy thinkers, who had invented, on paper, processes for the instruction of these unfortunates,—men like Cardan, Bonet, Amman, Dalgarno, and Lana-Terzi, whose theories, in after years, p