Helen Keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she was a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard University examination in Latin, German, French history, belles lettres, and such things, and does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace fashion.  She doesn’t know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with the meanings of them.  When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean character, her English is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light.  Has Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India and the American public school?  No, oh, no; for then she would be deafer and dumber and blinder than she was before.  It is a pity that we can’t educate all the children in the asylums.

To continue the Calcutta exposure: 

“What is the meaning of a Sheriff?”

“25.  Sheriff is a post opened in the time of John.  The duty of Sheriff here in Calcutta, to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly driven out by the coachman; but it is a high post in England.

“26.  Sheriff was the English bill of common prayer.

“27.  The man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called Sheriff.

“28.  Sheriff—­Latin term for ‘shrub,’ we called broom, worn by the first earl of Enjue, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage, and from this their hairs took their crest and surname.

“29.  Sheriff is a kind of titlous sect of people, as Barons, Nobles, etc.

“30.  Sheriff; a tittle given on those persons who were respective and pious in England.”

The students were examined in the following bulky matters:  Geometry, the Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Parliament, and in Metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from Descartes to Hume.  It is within bounds to say that some of the results were astonishing.  Without doubt, there were students present who justified their teacher’s wisdom in introducing them to these studies; but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed into these studies to waste their time over them when they could have been profitably employed in hunting smaller game.  Under the head of Geometry, one of the answers is this: 

“49.  The whole BD = the whole CA, and so-so-so-so-so-so-so.”

To me this is cloudy, but I was never well up in geometry.  That was the only effort made among the five students who appeared for examination in geometry; the other four wailed and surrendered without a fight.  They are piteous wails, too, wails of despair; and one of them is an eloquent reproach; it comes from a poor fellow who has been laden beyond his strength by a stupid teacher, and is eloquent in spite of the poverty of its English.  The poor chap finds himself required to explain riddles which even Sir Isaac Newton was not able to understand: