(the gist of whose statement about Mr. Ballard I print below) was kind enough to refer me to another printed account of a deaf-mute's cosmological ideas before the acquisition of language; and this led me to correspond with its author, Mr. Theophilus H. d'Estrella, instructor in drawing (I understand) at the California Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, and the Blind. The final result is that I have Mr. d'Estrella's permission to lay before the readers of the Philosophical Review a new document which, whilst it fully tends to corroborate Mr. Ballard's narrative, is much more interesting by its intrinsic content.[1]
The printed account just referred to appeared in the Weekly News (a paper published at the Institution at Berkeley, California, and printed by the pupils) for April 27, 1889. Although expressed in the third person, Mr. d'Estrella informs me that it was prepared by himself. I give it here as it stands, in the form of a note to a paper by Mr. J. Scott Hutton on the notions of deaf-mutes before instruction:
This interesting extract reminds Mr. d'Estrella of his similar notions. Nothing stimulated his curiosity like the moon. He was afraid of the moon, but he always loved to watch her. He noticed the shadowy face in the full
- ↑ Mr. W. Wilkinson, Superintendent of the Institution, writes to me of Mr. d'Estrella that "he is a man of the highest character and intellectual honesty. He was the first pupil that ever entered this Institution, and when I took charge of the school in 1865 he was about fourteen years old. It was at that time that I became specially interested in his account of his explanations of the various physical phenomena as they presented themselves to his untutored mind. At that time I wrote out many pages of his story, but this account, with a good deal of other material, was destroyed in our great fire of 1875. It very often occurs that deaf-mutes are not able to distinguish between the concepts obtained before and after education. By the time they have obtained education enough to express themselves clearly, the memory of things happening before education has become dim and untrustworthy; but Mr. d'Estrella was, and is, unusually bright and of a very inquiring turn of mind, so that before coming to school he endeavored to explain to his own satisfaction the reason of many things, and it is quite surprising how similar his explanations were to the explanations which are found in the childhood of many races. Mr. d'Estrella is imaginative, but quite as much so before education as since, and the early age at which he gave me the account of himself forbids the notion that he could have been influenced by mythologies, and the nearness of time, taken with his honesty, is sufficient assurance of the accuracy of his statement. You may trust Mr. d'Estrella perfectly for any statement he may make."
