742 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Schoolmaster Meyer represented him as a man of robust body, ready 

 with his hands, and of a more pliant mind than was generally thought, 

 divining quickly enough with whom he was dealing, and governing his 

 face and language accordingly. He came to Nuremberg without any 

 other intention than to become a light cavalry man. He found people 

 disposed to believe that he was a hero of romance and the victim of a 

 dark conspiracy. He entered into their idea, and invented the child- 

 ish story of the dungeon. People regarded him as simple-minded, and 

 spoke freely before him. He took advantage of all that he heard, and 

 was what they wanted him to be. The relative facility with which he 

 played his part may be explained still more easily if we suppose, with 

 Merker, that he had escaped from a traveling circus, where he had 

 gained some knowledge of the art of riding horseback, and had learned 

 to compose his face for the diversion of the idlers in the interludes. It 

 is said that in the last months of his life he had conceived a project of 

 making the tour of Europe, going from city to city, and making a 

 show of himself. Such a way of getting a living suited him much 

 better than the employment which Count Stanhope proposed. The 

 natural man appeared again, and prevailed over the studied part. 



The honest people Avho allowed themselves to be taken in by the 

 story of the dungeon w r ere never willing to .give it up. To them it 

 was as the last word of the gospel. It is hard to recant, and acknowl- 

 edge that one has been duped. We have seen in Paris a mathema- 

 tician of eminent merit holding as authentic letters in which Pascal 

 taught attraction previous to Newton, and continuing to believe in 

 those letters when no one else believed in them. We have seen in 

 Prussia an illustrious Egyptologist recommending to the Academy of 

 Sciences, as a work of incalculable value, a Greek manuscript fabricated 

 by a forger, in which he found confirmation of some of his boldest con- 

 jectures ; and it cost much trouble to make him acknowledge his error. 

 The eminent criminalist, Anselm Feuerbach, who joined to a warm 

 spirit and vivid imagination a taste for subtile ratiocinations and the 

 art of deciphering the secrets of hearts, could not decipher Caspar 

 Ilauser. From the first day he regarded him as a miracle, and, hav- 

 ing said it once, it was of no use to try to make him unsay it. "This 

 dear foundling," he w r rote to a friend in 1830, "has been for years the 

 principal object of my studies, researches, and cares. An inhabitant 

 of Saturn, falling during the night into the imperial city of Nurem- 

 berg, would not be enveloped in more mystery." He finally decided 

 that Caspar Ilauser was a Badenese prince, and till his death he was, 

 with King Louis, the most zealous champion of the legend. 



On the other side, physiologists and moralists, convinced that a 

 young man who had passed sixteen years in the solitude of a dungeon 

 might furnish valuable lessons respecting the primordial laws of hu- 

 man nature, studied him with devoted attention. Some thought that 

 they could discover in him all the signs of the " animal man," and 



