-V 



62 MAMMALIA — MAN. 



potatoes, and bacon. His father and mother were, from their poverty, 

 incapable of affording him any better nourishment ; and his education was 

 little better than his food, being bred up among the rustics of the place. At 

 six years old, he was about fifteen inches high ; and his whole body weigh- 

 ed but thirteen pounds. Notwithstanding this, he Avas Avell proportioned 

 and handsome : his health was good, but his understanding scarcely passed 

 the bounds of instinct. It was at that time that the king of Poland, having 

 heard of such a curiosity, had him conveyed to Luneville, gave him the 

 name of Baby, and kept him in his palace. 



Baby, having thus quitted the hard condition of a peasant, to enjoy all 

 the comforts and conveniences of life, seemed to receive no alteration from 

 his new way of living, either in mind or person. He preserved the good- 

 ness of his constitution till about the age of sixteen, but his body seemed to 

 increase very slowly during the whole time ; and his stupidity was such, 

 that all instructions were lost in improving his understanding. He could 

 never be brought to have any sense of religion, nor even to show the least 

 signs of a reasoning faculty. They attempted to teach him dancing and 

 music, but in vain ; he never could make any thing of music ; and as for 

 dancing, although he beat time with tolerable exactness, yet he could never 

 remember the figure, but while his dancing-master stood by to direct his 

 motions. Notwithstanding, a mind thus destitute of understanding was 

 not without its passions ; anger and jealousy harassed it at times ; nor was 

 he without desires of another nature. 



At the age of sixteen. Baby was twenty-nine inches high ; at this he 

 rested ; but having thus arrived at his acme, the alterations of puberty, or 

 rather, perhaps, of old age, came fast upon him. From being very beauti- 

 ful, the poor little creature now became quite deformed ; his strength quite 

 forsook him ; his back bone began to bend ; his head hung forward ; his legs 

 grew weak ; one of his shoulders turned awry ; and his nose grew dispro- 

 portionably large. With his strength, his natural spirits also forsook him ; 

 and, by the time he was twenty, he was grown feeble, decrepid, and marked 

 with the strongest impression of old age. It had been before remarked by 

 some, that he would die of old age before he arrived at thirty ; and, in fact, 

 by the time he was twenty-two, he could scarcely walk a hundred paces, 

 being worn with the multiplicity of his years, and bent under the burthen 

 of protracted life. In this year he died; a cold, attended with a slight fever, 

 threw him into a kind of lethargy, which had a few momentary intervals ; 

 but he could scarcely be brought to speak. However, it is asserted, that in 

 the last five days of his life, he showed a clearer understanding than in his 

 times of best health : but at lengtli he died, after enduring great agonies, in 

 the twenty-second year of his age. 



Baby, it is evident, was a creature calculated rather to excite pity or dis- 

 gust than any other feeling, — a being as stunted in mind as in body. But 

 to these diminutive beings nature does not always forget to give intellectual 



