14 DEFECT, DISCED ER, AND 



female wolf and her cubs, in India, f tried to fly at children 

 and bite them ' (Gerhardt). 



9. Absence of clothing, and repugnance to its use. 



10. Absence of spoken language-, no understanding of 

 man's language ; nocturnal howling, yelling and whining. 

 Hanoverian Peter c uttered no sound,' while Victor's ' voice 

 was imperfect and guttural. He could not articulate, but 

 uttered a monotonous sound' (Browne). 



1 1 . Insensibility to kindness. 



12. Absence of joy and its signs, no smiles nor smiling. 



13. Want of shame. 



14. No fixed or proper dwelling, and incapability of con- 

 structing any sort of shelter for the person. 



15. Incapacity for education or instruction, for mental pro- 

 gress beyond that possible in the case of other idiots (Brodie). 



The training of Peter, the wild boy of Hanover, was 

 attempted by Dr. Arbuthnot in 1724, at the instance of 

 George I. But the lad was found to be a deaf-mute idiot, in- 

 capable of education. c He could not be taught to perform 

 the simplest manual act without superintendence ' (Browne). 

 Again an effort at the instruction of Victor of Aveyron was 

 made by Itard. But Victor, too, was proved by Pinel to be 

 an idiot, and was treated as such by confinement in a 

 Parisian lunatic asylum . ( Although acquiring a knowledge 

 of certain conventional signs, and of the mode of performing 

 a few simple duties, he continued to display the chief charac- 

 teristics of his original animal existence' after all the 

 tuitional pains expended upon him (Browne) . 



One of a couple of wolf-children of Oude (India) de- 

 scribed by Professor Seeley died in the midst of Anglo- 

 Indian civilisation, in what to the poor boy himself was too 

 obviously an irksome captivity. His habits in the woods 

 had been those of a wolf, and notwithstanding all the efforts 

 at his reformation, he died as he had lived a ' lower ' 

 animal. But in the second case, there was a certain degree 

 of humanisation, though the process of improvement was 

 very slow and difficult. The whine was in course of time 

 exchanged for expressions of pleasure and gratitude; and 

 some other habit-changes resulted, of a kind comparable to 



