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To the American Public,

WHOSE PHILANTHROPIC HEART

EVER MOVES AT HUMANITY'S CALL

This Volume

IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED.

INTRODUCTION.

WE will not weary the reader's patience with an elaborate preliminary, nor with apologies for offering the present work to the public. We have been induced to enter the arena of bookmakers, by a desire to disseminate a more correct and extended knowledge of blindness, and its effects upon mental and physical development, than the reading public has hitherto possessed. In this way we hope to remove some of the most formidable obstacles that hedge up the way to usefulness and independence, for all who are placed in this condition; a condition to which, by the vicissitudes of life, every person is exposed, and in whose dark and inauspicious night more than five hundred thousand of our race are at present enshrouded. In almost every state of our Union, as well as in those of Europe, Charity, with her angelic hand, has raised up, within the present century, institutions dedicated to the sacred purpose of giving the light of science, and a knowledge of some of the useful arts, to those who behold not the beautiful earth and the serene sky. But sad experience has taught us, that until society in general better understands and appreciates the abilities

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