Meanwhile in the United States Dr Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was elected in 1815 to go to Europe to inquire into the methods of educating the deaf in vogue there. This was at a meeting held in the house of a physician named Cogswell, in Hartford, Connecticut, and was the result of the latter's discovery that eighty-four persons in the state besides his own little girl were deaf. Henry Winter Syle, himself deaf, tells how "four months were spent in learning that the doors of the British schools were 'barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,'" and how, disappointed in England, Gallaudet met with a ready response to his inquiries in Paris. With Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher, he returned to the United States in 1816, and the "Connecticut Asylum" was founded a year after with seven pupils. The name was changed to "The American Asylum" later, when it was enlarged. This was followed by the Pennsylvania, New York and Kentucky institutions, with the second of which the Peet family were connected. Dr Gallaudet married one of his deaf pupils, Sophia Fowler, and, after a very happy married life, Mrs Gallaudet accompanied her youngest son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, to the Columbia institution for the Deaf and Dumb, Washington, D.C., founded in 1857 by Congress and largely supported by Amos Kendall, and to the National Deaf Mute College, which was founded in 1864, was renamed the Gallaudet College, in honour of Dr T. H. Gallaudet, in 1893, and with the Kendall School (secondary), now forms the Columbia Institution. This college is supported by Congress.
The following account of the work done at the National Deaf-Mute College at Washington is worth attention, as the results are unique, and are often strangely ignored.
Here is a statement of the course for the B.A. degree:--
First year: Algebra, grammar, punctuation, history of England, composition, Latin grammar, Caesar.
Second year: Algebra (from quadratics), geometry, composition, Caesar (Gallic War), Cicero (Orations), Allen and Greenough's _Latin Grammar_, Myer's _General History_, Goodwin's _Greek Grammar_ (optional), Xenophon's _Anabasis_ (optional).
Third year: Olney's or Loomis's _Plane and Spherical Trigonometry_, Loomis's _Analytical Geometry_ (optional), Orton's _Zoology_, Gray's _Botany_, Remsen's _Chemistry_, laboratory practice, Virgil's _Aeneid_, Homer's _Iliad_ (optional), Meiklejohn's _History of English Literature and Language_ (two books), Maertz's _English Literature_, Hadley's _History_, original composition.