Pedro, a Spanish Benedictine monk who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, was celebrated as the inventor of the art of teaching the dumb to speak. His principal pupils were two brothers and a sister of the constable of Castile, and a son of the gran justicia of Aragon. They learned not only to write correctly, but even to express themselves by an articulate living voice. One of them, Don Pedro de Velasco, although he died at the age of twenty, had become a proficient in Greek, and a fluent writer and speaker of Latin. Another, assuming the garb of a Benedictine monk, was able to preach, and to go through all the other oral exercises of his calling.