n to stand or
walk till late, and then stands awkwardly, walks with difficulty,
crossing its legs immediately on assuming the erect posture, an
infirmity which it often takes years to overcome. Just, too, as the
idiot is slow to notice, slow in learning to grasp anything, or to stand
or walk, so he is late in learning to talk, he often acquires but few
words, for his ideas are few. He learns even these few with difficulty,
and employs the same to express many different things; he generally
articulates them indistinctly, often indeed so imperfectly as to be
almost unintelligible.

In other instances the evidences of idiocy are not present at birth, or
at any rate are not then noticed, but succeed to some attack of
convulsions or to some illness attended with serious affection of the
brain. Sometimes too there is no point in the child's history which can
be laid hold on as marking the commencement of the weakening of his
intellect, but as the body grows the mind remains stationary, or its
powers retrocede, until by degrees the painful conviction that the child
has become idiotic forces itself upon the unwilling parents. Here we
have sometimes the sad spectacle of the body perfectly developed, hale
and strong, but the mind obscured; the child in constant unrest,
perpetually chattering, laughing without cause, destroying its clothes,
or the furniture of its room, for no purpose; or sitting silent, with a
weird smile upon its face, looking at its spread-out fingers, or
stroking a piece of cloth for a quarter of an hour together as though
the sensation yielded it a kind of pleasure. It would be almost endless
to describe the various degrees of mental weakness; from the slight
silliness down to the condition in which the child is, and remains all
life long, below the level of the brute.

Parents as a rule are anxious to persuade themselves, and to persuade
the doctor that their idiot child was once as bright and intelligent as
others; and that the mind was darkened by some grave illness. We have,
however, the highest authority, that of Dr. Down, for saying that as a
rule which has but few exceptions idiocy from birth is more amenable to
training than that which comes on afterwards, that in fact it is more
hopeful to have to do with an ill-developed than with a damaged brain.

The one great question which still remains is what can the parents do
for best and wisest whom the affliction has befallen of having an idiot
child.