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.
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.
Apparatus for writing Braille.Fig. 2.
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 education of the blind.
The Braille alphabet consists of varying combinations of six
dots in an oblong, of which the vertical side contains three, and the
horizontal two dots 
. There are 63 possible combinations
of these six dots, and after the letters of the alphabet have been
supplied, the remaining signs are used for punctuation, contractions,
&c.
“For writing, a ruler is used, consisting of a metal bed either grooved or marked by groups of little pits, each group consisting of six; over this bed is fitted a brass guide, punched with oblong holes whose vertical diameter is three-tenths of an inch, while the horizontal diameter is two-tenths. The pits are arranged in two parallel lines, and the guide is hinged on the bed in such a way that when the two are locked together the openings in the guide correspond exactly to the pits in the bed. The brass guide has a double row of openings, which enables the writer to write two lines; when these are written, he shifts his guide downwards until two little pins, which project from the under surface at its ends, drop into corresponding holes of a wooden board; then two more lines are written, and this operation is repeated until the bottom of the page is reached. The paper is introduced between the frame and the metal bed. The instrument for writing is a blunt awl, which carries a little cap of paper before it into the grooves or pits of the bed, thereby producing a series of little pits in the paper on the side next the writer. When taken out and turned over, little prominences are felt, corresponding to the pits on the other side. The reading is performed from left to right, consequently the writing is from right to left; but this reversal presents no practical difficulty as soon as the pupil had caught the idea that in reading and writing alike he has to go forwards.
“The first ten letters, from ‘a’ to ‘j,’ are formed in the upper and middle grooves; the next ten, from ‘k’ to ‘t,’ are formed by adding one lower back dot to each letter of the first series; the third row is formed from the first by adding two lower dots to each letter; the fourth row, similarly, by adding one lower front dot.
“The first ten letters, when preceded by the prefix for numbers, stand for the nine numbers and the cipher. The same signs, written in the lower and middle grooves, instead of the upper and middle, serve for punctuation. The seven last letters of each series stand for the seven musical notes—the first series representing quavers, the second minims, the third semibreves, the fourth crotchets. Rests, accidentals, and every other sign used in music can be readily and clearly expressed without having recourse to the staff of five lines which forms the basis of ordinary musical notation, and which, though it has been reproduced for the blind, can only be considered as serving to give them an idea of the method employed by the seeing, and cannot, of course, be written. By means of this dotted system, a blind man is able to keep memoranda or accounts, write his own music, emboss his own books from dictation, and carry on correspondence.”
The Braille system for literature and music was brought into general use in England by Dr T. R. Armitage. Through his wise,
