Dr. Seguin met with a high degree of success in the instruction of idiotic and imbecile children, and in 1846 published a treatise on the treatment of idiocy, which will, for years to come, be the manual of every teacher of this unfortunate class.

While Seguin was demonstrating the truth of his theory of instruction at Paris, Herr Saegert, a teacher of deaf mutes at Berlin, having attempted, unsuccessfully, the instruction of a deaf and dumb idiot, was led to inquire into the reasons of his failure.  Without any knowledge of Seguin’s labors, he arrived substantially at the same conclusions, and devoted his leisure to medical study, in order to grapple more successfully with the problem of the instruction of idiots.  In 1840 he commenced receiving idiotic pupils, and has maintained a school for them in Berlin up to the present time.  Herr Saegert is inclined to regard idiocy as dependent upon the condition of the brain and nervous system, to a greater extent, perhaps, than Dr. Seguin, and to rely upon medication to some extent; though in his writings he professes to consider it a condition, and not a disease.

The success of the efforts of Seguin and Saegert was soon reported in other countries, and as early as 1846 excited the attention of philanthropists in England and the United States.  Schools for the training of idiots were established, on a small scale at first, by some benevolent ladies, at Bath, Brighton, and Lancaster, England.  In 1847, an effort was made to establish an institution in some degree commensurate with the wants of the unfortunate class for whom it was intended.  In this movement, Dr. John Conolly, the father of the non-restraint system in the treatment of the insane, Rev. Dr. Andrew Reed, Rev. Edwin Sidney, and Sir S.M.  Peto have distinguished themselves by their zeal and liberality.  Extensive buildings were rented at Highgate, near London, and at Colchester, for the accommodation of idiotic pupils, while a strenuous and successful effort was made to obtain the necessary funds for the erection of an asylum of great size.  The Royal Institution for Idiots, completed in 1856, has between four hundred and five hundred beds, and is already nearly or quite full.  Essex Hall, at Colchester, has also been fitted up as a permanent establishment for their instruction, and furnishes accommodation for some two hundred more.  Two small institutions, supported by private beneficence, have also been organized in Scotland.

The British institutions have admitted, to a very considerable extent, a class of pupils who are not properly idiots, but only persons of imbecile purpose, or simply awkward, and of partially developed intellects.  Some of these, who have arrived even at the age of twenty-five or thirty years, have been greatly benefited, and, after two or three years’ instruction, have left the institution with as much intelligence, apparently, as most of those in the same walk of life.  This result is, and should be, a matter of great gratification