MAN, PHYSICALLY CONSIDERED. 451 



whose hands she fell, and was thus enabled to give an 

 account of herself, and thus put to flight the dreams of 

 those self-called philosophers, who would infer that the 

 natural state of man was like that of the monkey, without 

 speech, and without reason. Voltaire says that if any 

 one wishes to learn the habits of the bee, he will not 

 take a solitary one that has wandered from the hive and 

 is lost, and neither should we, in learning the nature and 

 the habits of man, take an individual who from some un- 

 known cause has been thrown off from his companions, 

 and wanders alone in the solitude of the forest. And 

 yet from a few fanciful stories, like that of the young ne- 

 gress just related, Monboddo and Rousseau, followed by 

 a retinue of admiring disciples, have inferred that man 

 and the monkey are of the same species. Says Mon- 

 boddo, ' the Ourang Outangs are proved to be of our 

 species, by marks of humanity that I think are incontest- 

 able.' This truly is not a very complimentary conclu- 

 sion. Rousseau states this idea in terms still more revolt- 

 ing. ' All these varieties which a thousand causes have 

 produced and are producing, lead me to believe, that 

 many animals which voyagers have taken for brutes, be- 

 cause there was some difference in their exterior confor- 

 mation, or because they could not speak, were in reality 

 savage men whose race has been for a long period dis- 

 persed in the woods, and have had no occasion to devel- 

 ope any of their virtuous faculties, and have acquired no 

 degree of perfection, but remain in the primitive state of 

 nature.' The gentlemen therefore, who shoots a mon- 

 key in the forest of Borneo sheds the blood of his fellow 

 man, and by the laws both of God and man is a murderer. 



The pretended facts which are adduced in support of 

 this theory are unsatisfactory and trifling in the extreme. 

 The history of Peter the wild boy, is one of the most au- 

 thentic cases. 



In July, 1724, Jurgen Mayer was walking in his field 

 in Hanover, and found a naked black haired boy about 

 twelve years of age. The boy did not seem much afraid 

 of him, and the man by showing him two apples enticed 

 him home and secured him. He could not speak. Ap- 

 parently he had lived for some time in the woods, upon 



