Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1875 — Blind Folks. [ARTICLE]

Blind Folks.

The number of blind folks in the United Kingdom is stated to be 30,000, and a large proportion of these belong to the lower ranks of life, their blindness having been brought on by exposure to severe weather, overwork, or intemperance and dissipation.’ Cases of blindness are comparatively rare among the richer classes, they not being so exposed to these causes, ana it has also been found that nearly onehalf the number of blind people are sixty years of age and over, while of those under twenty years of age who are blind a large majority are found to have been so from infancy. The world of the blind! It is not our world, with sunny paths, brilliant colors, and flowery landscape. “Dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of-noon,” cried out the great soul of the blind poet, andfso groans many a one to-day, groping through perpetual night, upon which no morning can ever dawn save that of the Resurrection. We are apt to think of the blind as merely sightless, and sometimes have closed our eyes and tried to imagine how it would seem to be deprived of vision, but We cannot conceive of it; we cannot comprehend what it would be to live continually, day and night, in utter darkness, knowing naught of this busy world save what we hear and touch. How can we convey to a blind man any idea of the broad ocean, the sky above us, decked with fleecy clouds, and the earth beneath us robed in emerald loveliness ? So the blind dwell in a separate world from ours s yet it should be the grand object of all education for them to biend these worlds in one—to unite the two Peoples more and more in feeling and thought, leading each other onward to that realm where darkness shall flee away. One of the great characteristics of the blind is everywhere found to be intense concentration' and individuality of purpose. Whatever they do, whether making a bead purse, weaving a basket, learning a song, or groping through the mazes of a geographical study, all is done with steady, untiring zeal. There is a story told of a blind schoolteacher who could tell when the boys were playing in a distant corner, although a person with good sight could not detect the slightest sound. • Prof. Sanderson could, very soon after entering a room, tell how many occupants it had, and it is * said that there was a blind man in England who was a surveyor and planner of roads, his ears informing him of the distance as correctly as the eye to others; and the late Justice Fielding, who was blind, when coming into a roqjn for the first time, could tell the height and length of it through the medium of his ear. In Egypt, where blindness is so common among the natives, and .caused bjj the terrible disease of the country-*op-thalmia—l saw in Rosetta an old man, “the blind water-carrier,” he was called, time after time come to the river on his donkey, and having filled the goat skin which he carried, and lifted it to the animal’s back, he would place his hand upon its neck and start off to his customers, led by the donkey, and never led in the wrong direction. “ Locality, they say, is strongly marked in a donkey’s cranium.” “Ya muskun!” (poor thing) the Arabs would cry, as he went along. Yet I have seen, lying or sitting in the doorways of their dwellings, these veiy same people, the flies swarming in their faces and eyes, bringing the same fatal disease; yet they were too lazy to brush them away, and if warned of their danger would languidly reply: “It doesn’t matter; if the Lord wills us to be blind we shall be blind.” But in our enlightened land I fear we have, to a certain degree, the same spirit of the Arab. When we see men day after day reading the news as they ride from their Up-town homes to business in the lower part of the city we are reminded of the Egyptian, for those black letters dancing before their vision in the jolting of the car are like the flies of Egypt, and sooner or later the effect will be felt and the eyes become weakened and diseased. Children should not be allowed to bend low over their books, to sit facing the light when they study; and young ladies overworking their sight on some delicate piece of fancy work, would be wiser to spend less time upon it and use their eyes in a less trying if not a more useful manner. — Phrenological Journal.