112 THU POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



getlier without methcd and with a kind of crude harmony. In this he 

 found great enjoyment, often leaning back in his chair and laughing 

 heartily at some unexpected combination of sounds. In the warm 

 weather he employed a musical instrument of grand proportions, for 

 he used the whole side of a long, old-fashioned barn, rubbing the 

 blocks up and down as high as he could reach, the different boards 

 giving forth somewhat different sounds as he rubbed his blocks over 

 them. In a crude way he seemed to play upon the different boards, 

 as an organist touches the different keys of his instrument. After 

 years of this kind of musical performance, the boards on the side of 

 the barn were worn quite thin. 



He would never use or touch, if he could help it, any sharp-edged 

 tool, being afraid of them as of some animal that might sting or bite. 

 He was a hearty eater, and while eating would frequently stop and 

 make the peculiar grunt characteristic of the hog while eating, then 

 turning his head a little would seem to listen, and then go on eating. 



Was this man a case of arrested development ? Looked at in one 

 way, he appeared so. The great length of the body, the short lower 

 limbs, the forward stoop, the arms hanging far forward, the voracious 

 eating, the frequent grunt, the animal-like turning of the head and 

 listening while eating — all these things point to arrested development. 

 On the other hand, the excessive development of certain other senses 

 or faculties seems to show how, when certain unfolding powers and 

 organs of the human being are suppressed, the life-forces shoot out 

 and up enormously in other organs and senses ; as in a young growing 

 tree, if the top be broken off and most of the main branches lopped 

 away, the sap flows more vigorously into the remaining branches, 

 and they become enormously developed. Thus the common mathe- 

 matical powers of counting and calculation appeared to be nearly 

 aborted or suppressed, as he was unable to count or solve the simplest 

 arithmetical problem in the common way ; yet he solved in an instant 

 mathematical problems that, by what we call our normal mental facul- 

 ties, required several minutes of careful figuring to find a solution. 

 Blinded and imprisoned where we commonly see and understand, had 

 some of his faculties and powers surpassed the ordinary bounds in a 

 higher and finer development? It appeared so. Was he an idiot? 

 What meant his power of seeing in the dark, of selecting from among 

 a file of hundreds a paper containing a particular article, published a 

 year or mox'e before, though he had never learned to read a sentence 

 as we understand reading ? May it not be that the printed page gives 

 impressions of one kind to our common sight and understanding, and 

 of another, finer kind to subtiler senses, and a different, may be a 

 clearer understanding ? Thus we trace a man's way by the tracks 

 he makes in the snow or soft ground, while his dog follows him more 

 surely, not by these so palpable signs, but by some finer track or im- 

 pression, over or within what we see. May it not be that while we 



