of printing for the blind, and it was awarded to Dr Edmond Fry of
London, whose alphabet consisted of ordinary capital letters without
their small strokes. In 1836 the Rev. W. Taylor of York and John Alston
in Glasgow began to print with Fry's type. Mr Alston's appeal for a
printing fund met with a hearty response, and a grant of L400 was made
by the treasury; in 1838 he completed the New Testament, and at the end
of 1840 the whole Bible was published in embossed print. In 1833
printing for the blind was commenced in the United States at Boston and
Philadelphia. Dr S.G. Howe in Boston used small English letters without
capitals, angles being employed instead of curves, while J.R.
Friedlander in Philadelphia used only Roman capitals. About 1838 T.M.
Lucas of Bristol, a shorthand writer, and J.H. Frere of Blackheath, each
introduced an alphabet of simpler forms, and based their systems on
stenography. In 1847 Dr Moon of Brighton brought out a system which
partially retains the outline of the Roman letters. This type is easily
read by the adult blind, and is still much used by the home teaching
societies. The preceding methods are all known as line types, but the
one which is now in general use is a point type.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Moon Alphabet.]

In the early part of the 19th century Captain Charles Barbier, a French
officer, substituted embossed dots for embossed lines. The slate for
writing was also invented by him.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.

Apparatus for writing Braille.

Braille Alphabet. The black dots represent the raised points of the sign
in their position in relation to the group of six.]

Barbier arranged a table of speech sounds, consisting of six lines with
six sounds in each line. His rectangular cell contained two vertical
rows of six points each. The number of points in the left-hand row
indicates in which horizontal line, and that in the right-hand row in
which vertical line, of the printed table the speech sound is to be
found.

Louis Braille, a pupil and afterwards a professor of the Institution
Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles, Paris, studied all the various methods in
which arbitrary characters were used. Barbier's letter, although it gave
a large number of combinations, was too long to be covered by the finger
in reading, and Louis Braille reduced the number of dots. In 1834
Braille perfected his system. Dr Armitage considered it was the greatest
advance that had ever been made in the educat