Towards the gate of a modest edifice situated in the Rue St. Jacques, near the Luxemburg Garden, may daily be seen visitors attracted to this point from all quarters of France and even of the globe. The building they wish to enter was, until 1794, the seat of the minor seminary of St. Magloire, belonging to the Archbishop of Paris. In this year he ceded the house to the deaf and dumb institution, which, founded in 1760 by the Abbé de l’Épée in his own domicile, Rue des Moulins, was, just after the Revolution, raised to the dignity of a national establishment and transferred to the ancient monastery of the Célestins near the Arsenal. The national institution of the Rue St. Jacques, which still exists and which is under the direction of the Minister of the Interior, contains some 210 pupils of from seven to fourteen years. The school comprised, until lately, two divisions entirely separate and distinct, one for boys, the other for girls, when suddenly the girls of the Paris institution were sent to the institution of Bordeaux, and the boys of the Bordeaux school to that of Paris, so that at present, wherever they may have been born, the deaf and dumb boys are all at Paris, while the deaf and dumb girls are all at Bordeaux. Professor Ferdinand Berthier, of the Paris deaf and dumb school, himself deaf and dumb, maintained, in an article published some five-and-twenty years ago, that this pretended reform was no amelioration whatever; the deaf and dumb children studying perfectly well when the boys and girls were educated together under the same professors. At that time the Paris institution was administered by a director with the use of speech, assisted by an examiner of studies, similarly gifted, and a body of professors, some of whom spoke, while others were deaf and dumb. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE ST. LOUIS HOSPITAL.] [Illustration: COURTYARD OF THE ST. LOUIS HOSPITAL.] One of the best private deaf and dumb institutions in France is at Lyons. It contains a good number of pupils of both sexes, and its director is, or was until recently, M. Claudius Forestier, a very distinguished deaf-mute; his wife, a highly educated person--the speech-endowed daughter of the deaf-mute founder of the school--acting as directress. The number of deaf-mutes in France has been approximately estimated at 25,000; and here, as in nearly all countries where statistics are published, it is found that the male sufferers are decidedly more numerous than the female. To each establishment, public or private, workrooms are attached, conducted by competent instructors, and in which all the pupils, poor or rich, serve an apprenticeship to some profession, art, or trade which will one day enable them to earn a subsistence. No longer, therefore, is the community encumbered by deaf and dumb idlers; the men and women thus afflicted leading active lives as shoemakers, dressmakers, tailors, sempstresses, locksmiths, compositors and even painters and sculptors.