Sketches from Formosa.

XLIII
EDUCATION AND WORK FOR THE BLIND
IT is now fully thirty years since I was led to take up
this branch of work through help supplied by Mrs.
Graham, a daughter of the late Bailie Alston, who had
been Honorary Treasurer for many years of the Asylum
for the blind in Glasgow, and who had the honour of
having prepared the first complete version of the Scriptures
in any language for the blind.
As many Church people
in Formosa are familiar with
the romanised Amoy vernacular, I thought it would be
advantageous to make a beginning at least with books
in that form, only simplifying a few of the letters as
those in the Moon alphabet are. Dr. W. Wright, Editorial
Secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society,
then asked me to prepare the manuscript for an edition
of St. Matthew's Gospel, and other books were added.
These were all found to be suitable enough for elderly
people, and as an introduction to the quite unknown
process in Formosa of getting blind people to read by
the sense of touch.
Even at this early stage, however, Dr. Wright kept
urging me to make an adaptation of the Braille point-
system to our form of the language, and thus greatly
reduce the size of books, besides supplying blind people
with the means of writing out anything for themselves.
The adaptation thus made proved to be a very workable
one, and was willingly accepted at other centres of
the mission field in South China. It is an alphabetic
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