The Institution for the Education of Deaf-Mutes, Dr. Philip H. Gillette, superintendent, is, I believe, the largest in the world, and certainly one of the most thoroughly equipped and successful in its purposes. It has between five hundred and six hundred pupils. All the departments found in many other institutions are united here. The school has a manual training department; articulation is taught; the art school exhibits surprising results in aptitude for both drawing and painting; and industries are taught to the extent of giving every pupil a trade or some means of support—shoemaking, cabinet-making, printing, sewing, gardening, and baking. Such an institution as this raises many interesting questions. It is at once evident that the loss of the sense of hearing has an effect on character, moral and intellectual. Whatever may be the education of the deaf-mute, he will remain, in some essential and not easily to be characterized respects, different from other people. It is exceedingly hard to cultivate in them a spirit of self-dependence, or eradicate the notion that society owes them perpetual care and support. The education of deaf-mutes, and the teaching them trades, so that they become intelligent and productive members of society, of course induce marriages among them. Is not this calculated to increase the number of deaf-mutes? Dr. Gillette thinks not. The vital statistics show that consanguineous marriages are a large factor in deaf-muteism; about ten per cent., it is estimated, of the deaf-mutes are the offspring of parents related by blood. Ancestral defects are not always perpetuated in kind; they may descend in physical deformity, in deafness, in imbecility. Deafness is more apt to descend in collateral branches than in a straight line. It is a striking fact in a table of relationships prepared by Dr. Gillette that, while the 450 deaf-mutes enumerated had 770 relationships to other deaf-mutes, making a total of 1220, only twelve of them had deaf-mute parents, and only two of them one deaf-mute parent, the mother of these having been able to hear, and that in no case was the mother alone a deaf-mute. Of the pupils who have left this institution, 251 have married deaf-mutes, and 19 hearing persons. These marriages have been as fruitful as the average, and among them all only sixteen have deaf-mute children; in some of the families having a deaf child there are other children who hear. These facts, says the report, clearly indicate that the probability of deaf offspring from deaf parentage is remote, while other facts may clearly indicate that a deaf person probably has or will have a deaf relation other than a child.