degree of skill. The hand training is valuable, ideas of form improved, and the product ornamental and useful.

An important and practical part of the industrial work is mattress making and repairing, and broom making. The older and stronger boys in the intermediate grades, and some in the high-school grades, devote a period each day to this work. Here, again, the training and product are both valuable, and the boys learn a trade by which to make a living after leaving school. During the past year nearly forty-five hundred brooms were made and sold at the market price.

Another branch of the industrial work taken up by the girls of the intermediate and high-school grades is sewing and embroidery. They learn to use the needle with skill and to operate the sewing machine in making garments. The fact that some of them can thread a common needle by the sense of touch alone shows that deftness of fingers is acquired. This knowledge of sewing, in cases of necessity, can be turned to good account in making clothing for themselves and others.

In the high-school grades, the young men who expect to give special attention to music pass from the industrial work proper to the mechanical work in music, as repairing and tuning, the industrial work having been excellent preparation for this work. Others not interested in music may continue the industrial work thruout the course.

Thus it will be seen that the school offers advantages to pupils of different aptitude. If a pupil enters early and has good faculties, he may take the complete literary course; if he has talent in music, he may take a part or the whole of a music course with the literary work; if he lacks taste for music, he may take more industrial work with the literary work; if he enters late and has little aptitude in either literary work or music, he may devote most of his time to industrial work.

As to morals and religion, the school aims to inculcate and to require strict moral living. Each pupil is urged to select some church, the choice of his parents, and attend there regularly; all of suitable age being expected to attend every Sunday, the girls being accompanied to and from church by one of the teachers of the school. Sabbath school is conducted in the chapel each Sabbath by the superintendent. All the pupils attend, receiving non-sectarian instruction in Bible, history and Bible truths.

What is the state doing for the blind? To appreciate this it is well to understand the conditions that do exist and the conditions that would exist without the school, remembering that the number of students has increased from three pupils, at its inception thirty-six years ago, to ninety, at the present time, and that the near future is certain to add many more. One young man came to the school six years ago, having lost his sight by an accident when about 20 years of age. Having received little training, he came gloomy, despondent, feeling that there was nothing he

could do or be; that all cheerful living for him was past; in fact, that life was not worth the living. He learned to read and write the point system, and took a part of the literary course, giving special attention to the industrial work. He became more cheerful, hopeful, industrious, and forward looking. On coming back to the school last fall to do more industrial work, he stated, in the course of a conversation, that when he became blind he did not possess more than five dollars, but then (last fall) he had five hundred dollars in the bank drawing interest. He took a hopeful view of the future, and felt confident, with health, of being able to make his way in the world. He had saved five hundred dollars in five years, altho the greater part of his time had been spent in school.

Several young men, graduates of the school, have positions as tuners with music houses in the city. They are doing good work and earning good living salaries. Another graduate earned money enough in a few years to take a course in law at the university. He has finished with credit two years of the course and expects to complete it next year. By a law passed by the legislature last winter all tuition and fees are remitted to the graduates of the School for the Blind. One graduate also completed a college course at one of the colleges of the state, then took the degree of Ph. D. at Yale, and is now a clergyman. So far as known, he is the first blind man to take such a degree.

Another graduate took several years' work at the university, then a course at a Chicago medical school, and went out to practice.

A recent young lady graduate made for herself, while in the school principally, over three hundred point books containing outlines of many subjects, biographies, poetry, and other choice literature. She also copied for her own use the whole of an abridged English dictionary, and is now preparing to edit a paper for the blind. Another graduate earned money to send a younger brother thru the university, and is now paying the way of a second younger brother thru the university. Other young men and women go out to the smaller cities, towns, and rural districts of the state to become teachers of music, performers, tuners, etc.

These facts are mentioned, not from any desire of laudation of the school, but to give a just idea of what the school is doing and is trying to do; also as an incentive to others of this class who seek a higher life and higher fields of usefulness, for consciousness of achievement in the past helps to achievement in the present.

This is what the state has been doing for the blind. It has been liberal toward them in the past. It has provided beautiful grounds, commodious buildings, necessary equipments, and a competent corps of officers and teachers. The state has expended for the education of the blind in the last ten years over two hundred thousand dollars.

WHAT MINNESOTA IS DOING For Her FEEBLE-MINDED AND EPILEPTICS

DR. A. C. ROGERS, SCHOOL FOR FEEBLE-MINDED, FARIBAULT, MINN.

The Minnesota School for Feeble-Minded was organized in 1879. Twenty-two children were taken from the hospitals for the insane and placed in a frame building rented for the purpose by the board of trustees of the Minnesota School for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind. This work was only as an experimental school.

The following legislature made an appropriation for permanent quarters, and the institution has grown steadily until at the present time there are 876 feeble-minded and epileptic persons under the care of the institution. Fifty-six per cent. are males.

They are classified as follows: Training, 325; custodial, 382; epileptics, 169.

From this small rented frame building it has grown to a large institution, representing the investment of nearly half a million dollars, and to the support of which Minnesota cheerfully grants an annual appropriation that at the present time equals $136,000. The care and management require a corps of 150 people.

The direct objects of this institution are the care, training, and treatment of feeble-minded and idiotic persons and epileptics. The indirect object is to remove from homes the abnormal and defective children who cannot be properly cared for in these homes, and whose presence interferes with the proper training of normal brothers and sisters.

The backward child can make little or no progress in the common schools. He is apt to be the object of ridicule, and thus the tendency is to acquire an irritable disposition and nervous habits. As such children grow older, their incompatibility with normal children in normal homes becomes more marked. In poor homes the attention which such children require interferes disastrously with the breadwinning function of the family.

The institution is intended to become a pleasant home for all the classes mentioned that may need it.

The training consists of organized school work from the kindergarten. to what would correspond with the intermediate grades of the common schools, reinforced by and co-ordinated with various manual-training exercises and employments.

Colonization of the adults into small industrial groups all in one large village community is to be the tendency of developmental progress.

Epileptics are closely related to feeble-minded from the fact that the disease once thoroly established tends to produce mental deterioration. Regular habits, selected diet, abundant occupation for mind and body,

freedom from the anxiety attendant upon exposure to danger, with judicious medical treatment, are the factors that improve the epileptic's condition.

Colonization into pleasant homes, which should secure the above conditions, should be the predominating thought in institutional development.

CAUSATION

It is a very difficult matter to obtain reliable data concerning the etiology of the defective conditions with which we have to deal. As a general statement, it is an exhausted condition of the nerve force in the parents that is largely responsible for this causation. Worry and trouble in some cases, the strenuous life in many, physical overwork or social ambition, and dissipation in a few cases, result in defective progeny.

Only the collection of all facts pertaining to the family history of these people covering a period of many years will produce data that will .be of genuine value in the study of etiology.

Minnesota has contributed something to the study of experimental psychology among the defectives, and the studies of Dr. Wylie as to the measurement of the sense-perception among the feeble-minded as compared with normal children are published in the Journal of PsychoAsthenics. I am glad to state that he is continuing his investigations along these and similar lines.

Minnesota has developed, in a modest way, a system of training for attendants and nurses for feeble-minded, being the first state to attempt this work.

Whatever success these institutions have attained in either of these lines has been largely dependent upon her progressive, public-spirited citizenship represented in the management of the institutions by the intelligent, loyal board of trustees and board of control.

VICTORIOUS AMERICA!

G. FERRERI, EX-VICE-PRINCIPAL OF THE SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF, SIENA, ITALY An Italian writer, who visited the United States at the time of the Cuban War, sent a series of interesting articles to Italy for publication in a newspaper. Afterwards he collected these articles in a book with the title, L'America Vittoriosa (Victorious America).

I am visiting this country, as you know, for quite a different purpose, and in a time of peace; but I also have the intention of writing a report, in order to give an answer to my European colleagues who wish to know "what the United States is doing for the education of the deaf." Well,

every time that I think over my future report I cannot free myself from the suggestion of that title L'America Vittoriosa. Yes; America is victorious also in the national educational work, because here the instruction of all citizens is provided for, and, before all, of those who cannot become useful citizens without a special education.

Altho I am now in a favorable position for making comparisons, yet I am not quite sure of being able to express in words my particular impressions. However, I do not wish to lose this opportunity for expressing my general impression that, in regard to the education of the defective children, in Europe we are idealists, while in America you are practical; as great a difference, you see, as that which lies between “to be" and "not to be."

In Europe we speak and write much too much perhaps and we have the best ideas and the finest theories on the general education of the child, and particularly of the deaf, as well as of the feeble-minded; but we have not the means to put these ideas and theories into practice. Here I find the contrary. The Americans put into practice our ideas, and they make every effort to do it well. In Europe we have a large and rich special literature on the education of defective children, but there I have never seen put into practice so largely and liberally the suggestions of science in regard to the care and education of these children as is done in every state of this American union. And here I find also the best

schools for the deaf.

When I say this to my European colleagues they will certainly ask me also for the reasons of this great difference.

During my journey from Boston, I was reading the American Notes of Rudyard Kipling. At the end of the first chapter the author observes that"in America money is everything."

You know better than I with what wit and meaning Kipling made such an observation, but I am glad to complete the sentence, saying, if not with wit, at least with truth: In America money is everything, because only with money is it possible to put theories into practice; and this is true of every kind of knowledge and energy. What else but the lack of material means prevents the majority of the civilized nations from spreading the benefits of primary instruction? Money is, in this case, the first and fundamental condition; and I could illustrate my proposition with a quantity of facts and comments. I am sure of not exaggerating when I say that, comparatively speaking, there is not another country in the world where so much money is spent for the national education as in the United States. But I must add another reason; I have had many opportunities to realize that in America there are, besides money, also the best moral means. Among them I am glad to enumerate the

following ones:

I.

A great sympathy and active charity for all unhappy children.