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Read at Syracuse.

Idiocy may be spoken of in general terms as a privation, the measure and degree of which is to be determined by comparison with the normal and the average. Thus, it is the absence in a human being of some of the endowments that belong to humanity. I limit the term to humanity for the purpose of present discussion, though it might be extended downwards into the realm of comparative psychology, under relatively analogous conditions. To give it another expression, the idiot is wanting in the varied mental or moral characteristics of humanity, to a greater or less degree, in this or that or all directions that such activities take.

But inasmuch as man is a complex being, -- a bundle of correlated faculties and powers, dependent in their exercise upon equally intricate nerve elements, -- it follows that impairment of any one is more or less associated with manifestations of failure elsewhere. Still, in dealing with the class of idiots or any individuals of the class, to obviate, so far as may be, this abnormal condition, our first business is to analyze this general default into individual defects, and then meet them one by one by our educational or other efforts.

Tending to the same purpose is the fact that often individual peculiarities are marked and obvious; in short, so override all others as even to mask them. When this is the case, not only does the remedy of this become the prime issue with the friends of the parties, but invites the attention and the efforts of the educational specialist.

Who of us has not encountered the statement of parents or friends of pupils, whom it is proposed to submit to our charge and training, that there is no deficiency in the case, except that it cannot talk; and whose standard of future improvement of the child is the progress it may make in that respect?

This will serve as a somewhat clumsy approach or introduction to the subject which I propose to discuss or open for discussion at this time, namely, the relations of speech or the defects of speech to idiocy.

I use the term speech in its broadest sense and as including the underlying comprehension of language, of which it is the complement and exponent. There can be no true speech without the idea and comprehension of language. There can be no true comprehension of language and its uses without some effort at expression.

Speech is exclusively a human faculty. Muller asserts that it is the distinctive faculty of the race. At all events, any dissenting opinion must be based upon theoretical grounds only. So, too, in comparing one race of men with another, their relative mental condition and culture may be fairly measured by the copiousness and discriminations of the vocabulary of each. Even the number of words used, after making allowance for the varied uses to which a single word may be put, is a tolerably fair test of the intelligence of a people, or an individual, under the same or similar conditions of life. I emphasize this last clause because the scope of language, both as the means and instrument of thought, is dependent less upon the multiplicity of names, of ideas, and objects, and more upon the abundance of words expressive of the relations of objects and ideas.

It is not strange, then, that Esquirol, one of the earliest and keenest observers in the field of idiocy, assigned to speech, or the defect of speech, the chief place as a test of idiocy or default of intelligence; in fact, made it the foundation of his classification of idiots.

Dr. Howe, a disciple of Combe, in the specialization of faculties and their cranial seats, substantially adopted this statement of Esquirol, but with an apparently narrower use of the term speech that impaired its truthfulness.

Articulate speech or fluency of speech is not the test of human intelligence of any grade, but, in its simplest manifestation, the use of language to express wants, and later and higher the use of language that embodies thought as well as its use to communicate one's thoughts to others with promptness, ease, and clearness.

Speech, then, it may be repeated, in its broadest sense includes the idea of language as the instrument of thought; something prior to articulate speech in its development, and also, in a measure, independent of articulate speech in possession and in manifestation. As Seguin has expressed it, the faculty of speech in distinction from the function.

Time will not be wasted in a brief elaboration of this thought.

Study the normal child in the development of its faculties and powers. We must presuppose an individual self-consciousness as the foundation. Then the instinctive and expressive cries of infancy, signs of wants, of desires, of distastes, and disgusts. Next an appreciation of a response to these which confirms, modifies, and extends their use into the realm of volition. The awakened consciousness of the possession of vocal organs, and the intuitive disposition to practice the various sounds of which they are capable, both spontaneously and in the way of imitation. By and by it learns its own name, by the efforts of care-takers to attract its attention, then the names of familiar objects and persons around it, of its familiar belongings. Again, it acquires an idea of the use of language as a means of supplying wants. In all these steps natural language by signs precedes the conventional words. Then comes an appreciation of the fact that it possesses the power to communicate its wants by speech. Finally there follows imperfect and disconnected speech; at first more or less mingled with the more natural expression in the form of gesture language. In all this process we must assume that there is a born instinct and a native intuition that enables and guides.